Someday, Normal
by Saoirse agus amach
Summary: Lucy has had a rough few years filled with heartbreak and disappointment, just when she's convinced herself she's better off alone Steve Rogers comes into her life. StevexOC
1. Chapter 1

I decided to take a break from my Bucky story, Raze, which is pretty dark and not going over well anyway to write something sort of happy. This is just a cute little love story for Steve, with some drama and daring rescues thrown in. I just wanted to see our Captain happy. Please note, I have some *scenes* planned for Lucy and Steve, so the rating of this fic will probably change in a few chapters. Please leave a review :)

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All I did was try a new coffee shop. I didn't know that Starbucks being closed would alter the entire course of my life, but it did. There are so many things that would have resulted in a different outcome - if I had never moved to DC, if I had a different job, if my roommate didn't break our coffee maker - but I think it really comes down to choosing a random coffee shop.

Early morning has always been my favorite time of day. Growing up with five siblings meant the only quiet time I got was at dawn when the rest of the house was still asleep. As a teacher, the morning was my time to mentally prepare for the day and get in any last minute grading or lesson planning I had been putting off. Even though I love morning, my days do not start without coffee. So when I woke up to find Rosa, my roommate, had broken yet another coffee maker I knew the day wasn't going to be great. Things only got worse when I pulled up to Starbucks to find it had been 'closed for repairs'. A caffeine withdrawal headache was starting to form. Across the street was a little local cafe I had never been to so I tried that.

The coffee was delicious, I was officially never going back to the chain shop. I don't think I'll ever forget the details of that place, where my life changed for good. The little shop, Cafe Lincoln, was everything bigger shops tried to be. The walls were a gorgeous copper with industrial light fixtures and edison bulb sconces. Someone had meticulously curated local artists works and spread them throughout the shop. The best part was the smell. More than just coffee, Cafe Lincoln smelled like caramel, vanilla, and spice with a hint of sandalwood. I was instantly relaxed just sitting in my squishy leather chair watching DC wake up.

I had been there for maybe twenty minutes when he walked in. He was clearly a regular customer because the barista stood up from his stool with a grin and started making a drink without taking an order.

"Here you go, Captain."

"Thanks, Miguel." Captain Steve Rogers, Captain America, paid and sat down at a table across from me.

I tried to ignore him, I really did. I tried to just continue people watching and planning out my day. My mother always said I should learn when to speak and when to be silent, I'm still not sure I made the right choice.

The thing is, I started thinking about my students. Every day I stood in front of six classes of twenty-five to thirty teenagers and tried to teach them history. Every day I watched as my kids - because when you teach they all become your kids - grew more and more apathetic. Who cared about history when many of them weren't even sure where their next meal was coming from? I looked at Steve Rogers and thought of how much they all looked up to the Avengers. How they wore Captain America and Iron Man t-shirts and said they wanted to be superheroes when they grew up. The truth was, despite the destruction of New York and the controversy around them, the Avengers were a symbol of hope for my kids who had grown rather hopeless.

"Excuse me." I spoke just loud enough for him to hear.

"Sorry, ma'am, are you talking to me?" He turned to me with wide blue eyes and I had to smile, of course I was talking to him.

"Yes. Um -" I wasn't sure what to call him. Captain America? Captain Rogers? Mr. Rogers (wait...)? It came out "Mr. America." I instantly felt my face burn red, had I really just called Captain America 'Mr. America'?

The Captain, thankfully, laughed. "Please call me Steve."

I breathed a sigh of relief. He was good at putting me at ease. "I'm so sorry to bother you, it's just -" I paused, not sure exactly how to explain what I was hoping for from him.

"Are you alright?" He looked genuinely concerned.

"Yes, sorry. I mean, sorry for saying sorry." I stopped and closed my eyes, collecting myself. "Let me start over. My name's Lucy McAuliffe."

"Nice to meet you Lucy."

"Thanks." I smiled shyly at Steve. I wasn't good with talking to men in the best of circumstances. "The thing is, Steve, I'm a teacher, and I swear I'm not normally this - forward - but well you're you and I don't know when I could get a chance like this again. I was wondering if, for my students, I could ask you a few questions? It's just that the kids in my classes really look up to you, and all the Avengers, and I think it might get them to actually care about something."

Steve furrowed his brows, I was worried I had somehow offended him. "What kinds of questions?"

"Nothing personal, I swear. I'm actually teaching a unit on World War Two and I thought maybe I could just ask a little about life in the '40s. It feels really weird to say that, but, honestly it's kind of a historian's dream come true to meet someone who actually saw history happen."

"That's not so bad, I guess." Steve leaned back in his chair slightly. "Of course you'd need a picture or something to prove you actually talked to me."

"Right. I mean, only if you would be okay with that." I giggled inside, picturing taking a selfie with Captain America.

"What about, instead, I just come talk to your students?" Steve looked me in the eye like he was actually excited about the prospect.

I thought about our students. About how disrespectful they could be, about how some of them were scared to go home every day. I thought about Jeremy, a Freshmen who had once confided in me that he and his little sister were living in a garden shed so she wouldn't have to hear their parents yelling at each other every night. Having Steve visit would make him so happy. I also thought of my troublemakers who thought they were too tough for school. The ones already being recruited for gangs. Steve could maybe inspire them too.

"If you think you can handle a roomful of teenagers, you are more than welcome. Does next Tuesday work for you?" I couldn't believe this was actually happening. Of course I had to clear it with my principle, but I seriously doubt she would have any protest.

"I fought Nazis, I think teenagers should be easy. Where and when do I go?"

I couldn't help but laugh at his remark, knowing my students would give him a run for his money. "It's John Q. Adams High, if you could be there around 10 that would be awesome."

"Looking forward to it, Lucy. I gotta run, see you soon." Steve exited the coffee shop and I made eye contact with barista Miguel.

"Well damn." He said. "Wish you were my teacher."

I laughed both at his comment and out of adrenaline. This was actually happening. My day turned around.


	2. Chapter 2

Just a note about Lucy's job. While John Q. Adams is a fictitious school, it is based on the three different schools I have taught in. For those of you who might wonder, yes, public schools in the U.S. are this bad and the students do have these problems and much worse. The stories of her students are a conglomeration of various students I have had (I did not use any real student's name). I'm just saying, fund our public schools and be nice to your teachers. We put up with a lot and are for the most part doing our best.

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The day had finally come. Scheduling a visit from an Avenger turned out to be a logistical nightmare, but we made it work. Our principle, Dr. Ramirez had been fussing around the school all week, hastily covering peeling paint and strategically placing furniture over holes in the carpet. "Maybe he can get his friend, Tony Stark, to give us some money." I had heard her muttering while while painting over a rusted locker.

I had been given the morning to decorate the assembly hall and organize our student volunteers. The hall itself was nothing special, and it felt tacky to post a bunch of Americana decor, so I settled for a few old war bonds and recruitment posters from my own personal collection. We had decided the best way for this to work was to allocate forty-five minutes where all the history students would be in the hall listening to Steve. This included time for a question and answer session.

There were ten minutes left until students would begin filing in when Dr. Ramirez walked in with Steve. I wasn't sure if he would elect to wear his uniform or not and was happy to see he had gone semi-casual in jeans and a button-up. My breath hitched when he made eye contact with me. I'm a professional, but not immune to blue eyes and a dimpled smile.

"We're one of the poorer districts in the area." Ramirez was explaining to Steve, always looking for more funding. "But we make do with what we have."

I approached before she could start hitting up for Tony Stark's personal number. "Captain Rogers - Steve. It's good to see you again. Thanks for this!" I shook his hand and felt much more relaxed than I did in the coffee shop. The school was my domain, nothing could rattle me there.

Steve was an amazing speaker. I knew that early in the war he performed at USO shows and he seemed to get back to his roots. He even got the crowd to laugh a few times. I also noticed the topics he avoided. The speech was focused on the war and the '40s, but he tactfully avoided any stories of fighting or violence. He talked about the camaraderie between soldiers, about standing up for what was right, but not about fighting itself.

"Thank you Captain Rogers." I walked up to the podium once Steve was done talking. "We have a few students who submitted questions if you're ready for those?"

"Bring 'em on." Steve spoke into the microphone and flashed his award winning smile at the kids.

I had prescreened a ton of questions and selected the top ten to ask at the assembly. Most of them were about the war or the Avengers, I even jokingly let one student ask if he could have Black Widow's number. Finally, it was Briasia's turn. Briasia was an absolute sweetheart despite coming from one of the worst home situations I had ever encountered. She was one of a complicated mix of step and half siblings and had been removed from her home last year to be placed in foster care. The police had taken in her mother and step-father on three counts of child abuse and drug possession. Since then, she had been shuffled around the system with very little stability. Despite these odds, sweet Briasia was a top student and told me she wanted to be social worker. Knowing her story made her question extra poignant to me.

"Captain America," she read from a 3x5 notecard. "My name's Briasia. Here's my question. When you were fighting in the war, or with the Avengers were you ever scared or did you want to give up?"

Steve hesitated. For the first time, he seemed to be caught off-guard. "You know what Briasia, yes to both. I lost my best friend in the war, then I woke up in a completely different world, I'm still trying to figure out how cell phones work." The group chuckled a little at him while he sighed and looked down for a minute. "I woke up an everyone I had ever known was gone. And I met new people and they were threatened, the whole world was threatened so I fought again. And, I was scared, and sometimes I thought about quitting, but you know why I didnt, Briasia?"

"Why?" Briasia's voice was barely above a whisper. The whole assembly was hanging on his every word.

"Because," Steve continued on, his voice soft. "I've seen how the world changed, and it's changed a lot. The thing is, technology has changed, but people haven't. When I look around me all I can see is that there are still good people in the world and I have the ability to help them. It's scary, and I get really tired of being shot at, but when you really believe in something, you can't give up. Even when you want to, even when it's hard and it hurts, and especially when you're scared, you have to keep moving forward."

"Thank you, Captain." My voice was breaking and tears were pooling in my eyes threatening to fall. "Students, follow the hall monitors out and you can head to your homerooms. Let's hear it for Captain America."

The students all clapped and started out. I turned away from the crowd to collect myself and caught Steve staring at me. I wiped at my eyes and smoothed my pencil skirt.

"Are you alright?" Once again, he looked at me with concern written all over his face.

"I'm fine." I smiled to show him I was telling the truth. "I cry at everything, and what you ended with there, well, it was very beautiful."

"Well, I just tried to be honest. I'm betting that girl's been through the ringer."

"You have no idea. Thank you again for coming." I started to pack up my framed posters and generally tidy around the stage. There was a choir concert the next night and I knew the director liked having the stage pristine.

"Where did you get all these posters? They look pretty authentic." Steve commented as he examined Uncle Sam pointing at any passers by, telling them the U.S. Army wanted them.

I was proud of my collection so found myself grinning that he thought they 'looked authentic.' "That's because they are authentic. I collect them. That one was in an attic in New Jersey for about seventy years."

"What interests you about them?" Steve was still holding the picture, looking lost in a memory.

"Well," I had to think carefully, no one had ever asked me that. "I think it's that they tell a story. You know, I actually was working on a doctorate in history for a time. I've ready dozens and dozens of books on the war, but these posters actually let me _see_ history. I can picture some young kid looking at it and heading to the nearest recruiting station."

It occurred to me that Steve probably had been that kid. I saw the exhibit in the Smithsonian, he _was_ that kid. The air in the assembly hall seemed suddenly thick as I studied him and he studied me, both lost in our own thoughts. I jumped when I heard the bell ring, indicating it was time for a new class period.

"I better get going. No telling what will happen if I'm late for class." It was true. I was late once and came in to find a desk broken in half. Guests were supposed to be escorted, but I didn't think security would get upset at Steve for finding his own way out.

"Do you want me to carry these to your room?" Steve was holding my posters.

"Oh my gosh, no. Here, let me take them. I don't expect you to help me clean!" I awkwardly took the pile from him.

"Ok." If I didn't know any better, I would have said Steve looked disappointed. "Well I'll see around the Lincoln, right? Best coffee in the city."

My heart fluttered involuntarily. There was no way he actually meant what I thought he meant, he was just being nice, not flirting. "I'll probably be there." _Play it cool._ I told myself. _Don't seem too eager._ "Hope to see you again soon."

I turned and started walking to my classroom. My stomach was doing flip-flops the whole way there. This couldn't be happening, no way was I falling for Steve. No way was I considering opening myself up again.


	3. Chapter 3

We get some adorable romance and some drama this chapter. This one is short, mainly because I was really tired when I wrote it and it's just kind of a stepping off point to further the plot. It's shockingly difficult to write dialogue for a nearly 100 year old super soldier, btw. Thank you so much to my reviewers, I'm glad you like it so far! Please leave a review everyone, they really are great motivators for me as a writer.

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"You asked her out!" Natasha was grinning ear to ear.

"I just mentioned hoping to see her again, don't get excited, Nat." Steve used his shield to block a barrage of bullets heading their way. "And I probably blew it with her anyway, I haven't been able to go back to the coffee shop because somebody picked me up on my morning run."

"There's always that girl from accounting." Nat jumped from the main platform of the ship they were on, taking out three combatants. "But I'm willing to bet Teach will wait for you."

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I'm not saying I went to Cafe Lincoln every day for a week hoping to run into Steve, but I'm not saying I didn't. I figured I had read him wrong, imagined signals that were not really there. It was day seven of sitting in what Miguel had dubbed 'Teacher's chair' when I finally saw him again.

"You're here." Steve sat down next to me.

"She's been here every day." Miguel called over to us and I felt myself blush.

Steve smiled at me. "Is that right, Miguel?"

"Yep. She's my new favorite customer, Cap." Miguel winked at me.

"Have you really been here everyday?" Steve sipped his drink and looked at me curiously.

"The coffee's good." I raised my cup slightly. No way was I going to admit to him how I came here every morning and glanced up every time the door opened. One time, I even beat Miguel to the shop. I was being stupid, there was no way things would turn out well between Steve and I, but my curiosity had the better of me. I had actually resolved, though, that that would be my last morning going to Cafe Lincoln. I'm totally sure I would have stuck to it too.

"You have school today?" Steve asked.

"Ya, I need to get going here in a few minutes." I looked at the clock, I had just enough time to finish my coffee and get to my early IEP meeting.

"What about after school? Are you - do you do anything when you're not at work?" Steve stumbled over his words. All hints of the shining soldier he had been on stage were gone. I liked it, made him more human.

"I sometimes workout with my roommate. She's a cop so she gets me into the PD gym. But tonight, I don't have any plans." I gave Steve a look I hoped was flirty and not weird.

"Oh." Steve looked worried for a second, I saw him swallow a couple of times. "We could go, if you want, movies are good."

I couldn't help but laugh, this was the most adorable thing to ever happen to me. "Are you trying to ask me on a date?"

"Yes." Steve said resolutely, then looked down slightly. "Or no. Do people still go on dates? A friend from work said I needed to get out more."

 _A friend from work._ I tried picturing the Avengers I had seen on television sitting around talking about their love lives. "Yes, people still go on dates." I decided to put him out of his misery. "And I would love to go on one with you. Can you pick me up at seven?"

"That's great." Steve visibly relaxed. I wrote my address on one of the small notebooks Miguel kept on the coffee table and tore out the sheet for Steve.

"I really do have to leave, but I'll see you tonight, can't wait." I started heading to the door and Steve walked with me, opening the door for me.

"Me neither Lucy." I was a lucky recipient of one of Steve's genuine smiles. I swear, he could kill with those. As the door swooshed closed I was pretty sure I heard I heard Miguel mutter, 'bout damn time' to Steve.

I was floating on the air the whole drive to work. The radio seemed to play all the perfect songs and not even DC traffic could get me down. My mood came to an abrupt halt when I pulled up to school and saw several police cars and a large SUV outside. Instantly, I thought there had been a bomb threat or some kind of gang fight. I worried that there were students hurt. But as I got closer I saw Dr. Ramirez point to my car and two police officers greeted me when I parked.

"Ms. McAuliffe, we need to talk to you." One of the officers, an older guy with a pronounced belly directed me into the building where I was escorted to one of our meeting rooms.

"What the hell is going on?" I was starting to get mad. I had never in my life done something illegal. What were they trying to question me for? Before my question was answered a second person came into the room, this one wearing a windbreaker with the letters FBI emblazoned on it.

"Ms. McAuliffe." The FBI officer was a pretty dark-haired woman who looked to be in her late thirties. "Sorry about the dramatics. I'm Agent Holt from the FBI. We need to ask you about your ex, Nate Turner."

I creased my eyebrows at the same time I felt my heart stop. I hadn't heard that name in three years. "What about him?" I asked coldly.

"Has he tried to contact you recently?"

Contact me? Why would he do that? How could he do that? "Of course not. He's in federal prison."

Agent Holt shared a significant look with the police officer in the room. "Mr. Turner somehow managed to escape five days ago. We have you down as a person he might try to get a hold of."

"He tried to kill me!" I subconsciously ran my hand over the scar on my abdomen. "Why would he try to find me? Besides, there's no reason for him to even know I left Chicago."

"When someone is narcissistic and delusional like your ex, the chances of him returning to a victim are actually pretty high."

"So what are you going to do?" I was getting nervous, just when I thought my life was back on track my past came around to smack me in the face.

"For now, nothing." Agent Holt squared her shoulders, as if she disliked what she was saying. "Here's my card. If you have anything unusual happen to you, if Turner tries to contact you, I want you to call me. Day or night." Holt paused and looked at me sympathetically. I got the distinct feeling she wanted to do more. "You live with a DC cop, right?"

I nodded.

"Let her know what's going on, tell her to be on the lookout too."

I nodded again, taking in Holt's advice. My hands were starting to shake. Nate had escaped and it appeared that the FBI believed I was his first stop.


	4. Chapter 4

This chapter was starting to get INCREDIBLY long so I decided to divide it up into parts. Thank you again to my reviewers, I promise some romance next chapter and lots of action in the chapter after that. Please leave a review :)

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I wish that I had the rest of the day off, but finding a substitute last minute is pretty much impossible. Instead, I spent the whole day looking over my shoulder, by the time I got home my nerves were completely frayed. Which is why I nearly had a breakdown when I found Rosa's boyfriend, Jimmy, laying in a pool of red on our kitchen floor. I screamed and dropped by bag.

"Whoa whoa whoa! Chill, chica." Jimmy stood up, seemingly unharmed.

"What the hell, Jimmy?" My heart was still beating out of my chest when Rosa came running out of her room with a camera.

"Sorry. We're recreating a crime scene." Rosa told me, as if that was an explanation. "Jimmy's found a cold case to work on and the photographs were all really faded so we're taking fake ones."

"You guys." I pinched the bridge of my nose. I should have been used to these sort of shenanigans, Rosa and Jimmy's police work style was always less than conventional. "That makes almost no sense."

"Ya, well, you're not a cop. C'mon, babe, take pictures of my body." Jimmy laid back down on the floor, I could now tell the 'blood' was actually ketchup and red jell-o.

"When's your date with Mr. America?" Rosa asked me as she started taking 'crime scene' photos; they had even recreated blood spatter patterns on the wall. I had texted her to tell her about my morning at the coffee shop, but left out the rest of the morning.

"He's picking me up in a few hours, but listen, I need to talk to you two." I sat down on one of the barstools against our kitchen island and watched them work.

"What? Did he cancel?" Rosa stopped taking pictures to look look at me. "Do I need to kick his ass?"

Rosa never ceased to make me smile with her kick ass attitude. "No, nothing like that. Way worse actually." I paused, trying to decide if I really wanted to burden my best friend with my problems. Holt was right, though, it would be good for Rosa and Jimmy to know, they were basically my family. "Nate escaped from prison five days ago."

My statement hung in the air as they both took in the information. Jimmy quickly stood up and brushed the 'blood' off, he was instantly in cop mode. "Who told you that?"

"The FBI were waiting for me at school this morning."

"And you didn't think to call me about this?" Rosa looked like she was about to murder someone.

"He's been out for five days. The agent said he might try to contact me. But really, he has no idea where I am. As far as he knows I'm still in Chicago." This brought me some small comfort, except that if he was looking for me his first step could be my mom's house. Thankfully, my oldest brother was living with her and could hold his own in a fight.

"All it takes is a google search and he knows where you work." Jimmy was pacing the kitchen. "You shouldn't go out tonight, he might be following you."

"No, absolutely not. I am not going to stop living my life because of him." I had stopped my life because of Nate once before, it was not going to happen again. "Besides, I'll be with _Steve Rogers_ , I don't think I'll be in any danger."

"At least take a taser with you. One of my knives too, and a couple of my guns, and my night stick." Rosa listed off her armory.

"I'm not doing any of that. I'll carry my mace like I always do."

"I'm going to have some patrolmen post outside the building for the next few nights." Jimmy was a lieutenant in the department, he had the power to do so. Having police watching our apartment actually made me feel better.

With that settled I left them to finish their strange work and decide on an outfit for my date. After five or six changes I decided on skinny jeans, boots, and a floral blouse that was cut just low enough to show the promise of cleavage without being indecent. I did my best to wrangle my long blonde hair into a crown braid was just finishing my makeup when I heard a knock at the front door. I instantly felt sick, I hadn't been on a date in years, and I _really_ liked Steve. _Just breathe_. I told myself. I counted five objects in the room, my hairbrush, my mother's pearl earrings, a picture of my dad and I, my blue bedspread, and a college textbook. It was a habit I picked up when I was going through therapy after the Nate fiasco, it helped me center myself and focus on the 'now' rather than worry about the 'later'.

"There's a man here." Jimmy called towards my room in a fake 'Gone With the Wind' accent. "And he brought flowers." I adored Jimmy, he was crazy at times, but great for Rosa and like a brother to me.

I exited my room just in time to here Rosa talking to Steve. "My girl hates lilies, you ever bring her a lily, I'll cut you."

"Rosa!" I admonished. She was right, lilies are the worst, but she also had a habit of forgetting not everyone understood her dark humor. Steve, however, wasn't even looking at her, his eyes were totally focused on me.

"Sorry about her, my roommate has violent tendencies, we're working on it. Thank you for these." I took the offered roses from Steve. No one had ever brought me flowers before.

"They got a little ruffled on my bike, sorry about that. You look amazing." Steve was being the perfect gentlemen and I was pretty sure I was going to melt into the floor.

"You ride a motorcycle?" I was slightly concerned about that. My one experience on a bike involved one very reckless brother speeding through traffic in downtown Chicago.

"Of course he does." Jimmy came up and put his arm around my shoulder. "Now, Captain, what exactly are your intentions with our daughter?"

"Okay." It was time to put a stop to this. "We're leaving. Rosa, Jimmy. Good luck with your fake crime scene. Put these in water for me." I handed the roses to Rosa. "And don't you dare use them as some kind of murder weapon."

I grabbed Steve's hand and lead him outside only to hear Jimmy yell, "I know every cop in town, buddy. Have her home by eleven!"


	5. Chapter 5

A note about timing. This story will follow The Winter Soldier, and MIGHT continue through Civil War, depending on how dedicated I am feeling. While it follows those stories, a lot won't be canon.

Thank you, for being a faithful reviews, I tried to make this chapter a little longer. Everyone else, please leave a review! Let me know if you prefer shorter or longer chapters.

* * *

Steve laughed as we approached a blue Harley parked in front of the building. "I like your friends." At least he knew not to take them seriously.

"They can be a bit much, but after almost three years of living with Rosa, they're my family." I smiled up at our apartment window where Rosa and Jimmy were watching us. "So what is the plan for tonight?"

The plan was a pretty typical date; dinner, movie, walk along the river. Steve said 'a friend from work' recommended the movie, a remake of _Roman Holiday_ that didn't hold a candle to the original. Of course, it occurred to me halfway through the film, Steve probably didn't see the original. Even better than watching the movie was watching Steve react to the movie. He ate popcorn and at one point held my hand, but was entranced by the screen. At dinner, a pretty low key Italian place, I commented on how he seemed to really enjoy the movie.

"I used to love going to the movies, that's the first time I've been since they unfroze me."

"So what you're saying is you have over seventy years of movie history to make up for?" I sipped my white wine and thought about all of the history he was missing.

"Maybe you can help me catch up. We'll spend a whole weekend watching all the good ones I missed." Steve grinned at me and my stomach did somersaults.

By the time he pulled the motorcycle up to a park by the river I was on cloud nine. Not that I had that much dating experience, but I was pretty sure modern men didn't act like Steve. He took my hand and lead me to a walkway that we wandered down in amicable silence for a few minutes.

"Why don't you like lilies?" Steve asked suddenly.

"Oh, um." I faltered, not sure if the answer was too heavy for a first date. Steve had been amazing all night though, and despite myself I was starting to trust him. "My dad died when I was seven. Everyone sent lilies to the funeral, I guess because it was close to Easter and that's what the floral shops had the most stock of. After the funeral the flowers were brought to our house, which wasn't very big. So for days after the funeral I was surrounded by that sickly sweet smell and it eventually made me sick. After he saw how badly they made me feel my older brother, Sean, threw all of them away. I haven't been able to smell one since without feeling sick."

"Sorry." Steve squeezed my hand encouragingly. "I didn't know it would bring up bad memories."

"No, no. It's really fine. I have nothing but good memories of Dad, and my siblings and I are really close, I think because we all lost him so young." It was true. I missed Dad every day, but my brothers, sister, and I had always been closer than other siblings I knew.

"And how many of those do you have?"

I smiled, thinking of my large family. "Four brothers and a sister. The two oldest boys are twins, then another brother, then me, my sister, and my younger brother who is still in high school. My parents were good Catholics."

"That sounds great." Steve continued walking. "I always wanted a big family, but it was just my mom and me. And Bucky."

"That's your friend who died in the war, right?" We were venturing into some pretty heavy territory.

"Ya, he was more like my brother." Steve's face turned dark and I knew he was thinking of his friend. "But let's move on to something less depressing. Why did you move to DC?"

I laughed. "That's not a great change of subject."

"Well I still want to know." Steve smiled and squeezed my hand again.

"I moved because of a guy." I sighed, this was a topic I had been trying not to think about. "I got involved with someone back in Chicago who was...not so good. He went to prison and I got a job offer here, found Rosa, and haven't looked back since."

"I'm so sorry." Steve stopped and I realized we had an amazing view of the Mall. "I seem to have a habit of bringing up your worst memories."

"It's fine. I'm kind of a landmine. But we've been talking about me this whole time. Tell me something about you." I thought for a moment, of course the whole world knew his story. "Something I can't read in a museum exhibit."

"I love baseball. I've been a Dodgers fan my whole life."

"Did anyone tell you..." I put my hand on his arm in mock sympathy.

"Ya, that's quite possibly _my_ worst memory." Steve laughed. "I'm not sure who to root for now."

"You can always come to the Cubs side."

"Blasphemy!" Steve yelled out and clutched his chest dramatically. "The Cubbies? Really, Luce? They haven't been good since before _I_ was born."

The way he called me 'Luce' made me tingle and I laughed at his antics. Steve suddenly pulled me to close to his broad chest. I said a silent thank you to whoever had made the serum that made him so muscular, being held in his arms was as safe as I've ever felt. I looked up and met his gaze.

"I really like making you laugh." His lips were still in a half-smile and his eyes bore into mine. I wrapped my arms around his back, pulling myself as close as I could possible get while still looking at him.

"I like you making me laugh." I couldn't help the stupid grin on my face even as the air between us crackled with electricity.

Steve lowered his face inches from mine. "I'll have to do it more often, then." His voice was just above a whisper, then he closed the small gap between our lips and instantly felt like I was on fire.

There are a few glowing moments in my life that I remember every tiny, minuscule detail of. my brother giving me keys to my first car, holding my nieces and nephews for the first time, but this kiss tops them all. I remember the feel of his lips on mine, his hands as they stroked my back, the sound of the river, and knowing that - even though I had kissed before - I never truly had my _first kiss_ until Steve Rogers.

All too soon Steve was reluctantly pulling away but kept his arms around me. "I could do this all day." He said cheekily.

"It's night." I said dumbly, feeling almost drunk just from one kiss.

"And Jimmy did threaten to have me arrested if I don't get you back soon." Steve started walking us back to the direction of his Harley. "But I'm not ready to let you go."

I wasn't ready for the date to be over, either. Were dates allowed to just, not end? "Drinks. There's a pub around the corner from my apartment we go to all the time."

We pulled up to Logan's Pub and I reluctantly crawled off of the bike, instantly missing the heat of Steve against me. He was apparently thinking the same thing and slung an arm over my shoulder as we walked in. Per usual, Logan's was packed but one of the benefits of being best friends with Rosa was access to the booth the owner always kept reserved for her. A few years back Rosa had arrested a thieving employee and the pub owner gave her the booth as a thank-you.

We sat down with Steve facing the door and I waved a cocktail waitress over. We were holding hands across the table, waiting for our drinks when Steve went suddenly rigid and glared towards the front door.

"You have got to be kidding me." He angrily muttered.

I turned to see what he was looking at and saw two people approaching. One was a ridiculously gorgeous red headed woman and the other was a stockier guy who did not look to happy to be there.

"Steve!" The woman slid easily next to me in the booth. "Fancy seeing you here!"

"Natasha." Steve ground out. So this was the infamous Black Widow of the Avengers.

"Clint's in town and I said to him, 'why don't we go have a few drinks? I'm Nat, by the way." She turned to me and offered her hand.

"Lucy." I shook her hand and looked warily at Steve, not quite sure how to read the situation.

"Actually." The man named Clint sat down next to Steve. "She said, 'why don't we go spy on Cap's date?'"

"Barton, you traitor!" Natasha stuck her tongue out at Clint and winked over to Steve.

"Friends from work?" I asked Steve, trying to diffuse some of the tension he was throwing off.

"Something like that." Steve shot both of them a glare. "If you two were supposed to be spying on us why did you give yourselves away?"

"I really wanted a beer."

"And I wanted to meet the woman who finally got Captain Rogers out of his apartment. All he ever does is work, Lucy." Natasha ordered two beers when the waitress delivered mine and Steve's drinks.

I actually enjoyed sitting there with Clint and Natasha. Clint had some of the driest humor I had ever witnessed and Natasha teased both of them mercilessly. After a few drinks I noticed that three of us were getting tipsy, but Steve was not fazed. When I asked about it he explained how the serum worked on the cellular level, preventing him from every getting drunk.

"It's not fair is it?" Nat pointed her beer bottle towards Steve. "He can drink as much as he wants and never has to worry about getting drunk or putting on weight."

I was about to respond when my phone rang with Rosa's personalized ringtone. "Rosa, what's up?" I answered quickly, she was on morning shift so it wasn't like her to call this late.

"Don't react sweetheart." My blood ran cold when I heard the familiar voice on the other end of the line. "You might find your friend in pieces if this doesn't go my way. Get away from the table."

"Luce, what's wrong?" Steve had noticed my sudden demeanor change.

"Nothing." I put the phone down without hanging up and tried to give him a reassuring look. Nat and Clint were also staring at me. "I just need to take this call, Rosa needs help with something. You mind letting me out?" I indicated to Nat that I needed out of the booth, she acquiesced reluctantly.

I tried to remain calm and not run to the bathroom, but I knew I was a terrible actress, the whole table could probably tell something was up. "Nate." I spoke into the phone once I was alone. "What do you want? Where's Rosa?"

"Your roommate is fine, for now. And as for what I want...baby you know what that is. I've missed you, I want to see you." Nate's voice hadn't changed, he was still charming and knew exactly how to sound desperate enough I almost sympathized with him.

"You're a monster. I'm calling the police." I spat back into the speaker, terrified about what could be happening to my friend.

"Thought you might say that." This time the voice wasn't in the phone. It was right next to me. Before I had a chance to scream Nate had his hand around my mouth and my throat. "Don't scream. I will crush this pretty throat if you do."

He pulled me to the back door. No one was around and I frantically looked towards the bar, trying to catch someone's attention. It had become so crowded I couldn't even our booth. Nate pulled me outside and I started to kick and flail for all I was worth while he tried to force me into a black van.

I fell over when he was suddenly torn away and looked up in time to see Steve pin him to the ground. Clint helped me up and starting checking me for injuries while Natasha searched around the van with a gun drawn.

"Who are you?" Steve yelled and grabbed Nate by his shirt collar with one hand while the other formed a fist.

Nate started laughing maniacally causing me to shudder, I knew that laugh all too well. "Are you fucking Captain America, baby?" He shifted his head so he could see me. It was the first time I had been able to see his face. Prison was not kind to him. His once handsome features were scarred and gaunt, his dark eyes sunken in so far he resembled a skull, and he sported a scraggly beard.

"You don't look at her." Steve pushed Nate's chin so he couldn't see me. "I'll ask you again, who are you."

The sound of Nate's unhinged laughter filled the whole night. I heard Steve shout 'no' then watched as Nate grabbed Steve's bicep and said clearly, "Hail Hydra."


	6. Chapter 6

Thank you to everyone who has followed, favorited, and reviewed. Please continue to review, it really does give me the momentum to keep writing. This chapter skips around with view point a little bit, I thought it was important for you to see how Steve is feeling about Lucy.

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Steve stood in disbelief at what he had just heard. "Cyanide capsule." He announced to Nat. Both of them knew that was the M.O of Hydra back in the day, suicide before being forced to give information.

"Who was that?" Nat grabbed Lucy away from Clint and pinned her against the van. "Who are you working with?" She sounded vicious and Lucy looked terrified.

"Nat!" Steve interfered, putting himself between the two women. "This isn't Lucy's fault, _he_ attacked _her."_

"She's on a government watchlist." Natasha didn't take her eyes off of Lucy. "I looked her up in our system before meeting up with you."

"Lucy?" Steve looked over to the woman he had just had the most incredible night with. He didn't want to believe that the first girl he took out was some kind of sleeper agent. Lucy was too sweet for espionage, then again, Natasha was a master assassin and all too good at tricking people.

Tears were falling from Lucy's eyes causing her makeup to smudge. "Steve, please. Rosa might be hurt, I have to get to our apartment. I can explain everything, please, just take me home."

The four of them made an awkward procession around the block to Lucy's apartment, Natasha kept one hand on her gun the whole time and Clint alertly looked around them for threats. But Steve only had eyes for Lucy. The more he watched the more he determined there was no way she was a spy. Her face was deeply etched with worry for her friend and her whole body was shaking. When they got to her building she ran up the three flights of stairs to her door and ripped it open.

Rosa was inside, tied up and wearing her police uniform with a gag tied tightly around her mouth. Lucy found a kitchen knife and set to releasing her friend. As soon as she was free Rosa jumped up and started swearing to kill Nate Turner, Steve assumed she meant the man from behind the bar.

"He's dead, Rosa." Lucy said quietly from where she was standing next to the island. "Killed himself before he could be taken in."

Rosa's jaw twitched. "Fucking coward." She muttered.

"We need to know exactly what happened here." Natasha crossed her arms, silently challenging Rosa to try and get out of giving an explanation.

Rosa glared, but started talking, directing the conversation to Lucy. "I was just about to go to Jimmy's before work. When I opened the door Turner knocked me out with a blow to the head." She moved her wavy black hair out of the way so that they could see a large, angry bump forming. "I came to and was tied up, he was going through Lucy's room and then ran out."

"What did he take?" Lucy asked. She was slowly regaining her composure, but Steve noted that also still looked terrified. Every movement around her made her flinch and she was breathing heavily, just like a soldier fresh out of a battle.

"Looked like an old backpack. Green and yellow plaid."

Something dark passed over Lucy's face. "My dissertation. Of course."

"You want to fill the rest of us in?" Natasha arched an eyebrow at Lucy, clearly growing impatient.

"I will. Please, just let me call my family first. Nate had to find out where I was from someone, he could have hurt them." Something stirred in Steve's chest when Lucy spoke about her worry over her family. Natasha was in Black Widow mode, a thing time-test assassins feared, and Lucy wasn't backing down to her because she was worried about her family.

"Keep it on speaker phone." Nat ordered.

The line rang three times before a male voice answered. "Hey Lulu." Steve saw Lucy smile and close her eyes at the greeting, relief written all over her face.

"Sean, are you all alright?" So it was Sean she was talking to, the older brother who threw out the flowers.

"I mean, mom's kicking my ass at scrabble and also I'm spending my Friday night playing scrabble with my mom."

"No, I mean -" Lucy paused. "Has anything weird happened? Anyone come looking for me?"

"Lu." The voice on the other end turned serious. "What kind of trouble are you in?"

Steve made a mental note that he didn't ask _if_ she was in trouble, just assumed that she was.

"It's nothing. I just - miss you guys. Just checking in." Lucy's voice rose an octave as she spoke.

"You're a terrible liar. Do I need to get the brothers together, fly to DC, and bust some heads?"

"No, do _not_ come to DC. Listen, I'll call you later, I have to go, love you."

Lucy hung up before her brother had a chance to respond and walked through the kitchen to the tiny living room, collapsing into a chair.

"Someone needs to start talking soon, I'm getting bored." Clint leaned against one of the walls and pantomimed a yawn.

Steve crouched down in front of Lucy and put a hand on her shoulder. "Hell of a first date."

Lucy snorted lightly and wiped at her eyes.

"Luce." Steve continued. "We need to know what's going. Who's Nate? What happened tonight?"

Lucy looked past Steve and over to Rosa, silently asking her a question. "Pretty sure this one," Rosa pointed to Natasha. "Is going to throw you in Guantanamo or something if you don't spill."

Lucy nodded, squared her shoulders and launched into her story.

"I met Nate Turner while I was working on my PhD at the University of Chicago. My dissertation was almost finished and ready to defend when the school cut my funding. They said what I was writing was too controversial. The paper was pretty straightforward, a history of secret Nazi organizations and what happened to them after the war. Most of those files had remained hidden by the Russians but were de-classified under glasnost. The one organization I was really interested in was Hydra. Of course the official story was that it died with the Red Skull, but as I traced the history of other organizations deeper I kept finding small references or events that just screamed Hydra. I was never convinced they had actually disappeared, just gone further into the shadows.

In one chapter of my dissertation I hi lighted the conspiracy theories surrounding Hydra. The most dominant being that members of Hydra infiltrated the U.S. government when we hired former Nazis after the war. I was told to cut that chapter out, but it felt wrong to not mention something that was more and more looking true. The University launched an investigation and I had to go before the regents and explain myself.

That's when I met Nate. He was a professor from another university who was called on as an expert witness in my case. He fought for me. He said that what the college was doing was a violation of my rights. We got close. He was unlike anyone I had met before, a genius, philanthropist, everything I always wanted to be. He pushed me to keep researching Hydra. I thought he just wanted to know the truth, like me, but he had much darker intentions. It became evident that Nate was obsessed with Nazis, Hydra, and genetic engineering. I found out he was even a member of a Neo-Nazi party that was trying to find the remains of Hydra and join them."

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I stopped my story, not willing to go on, knowing that the next part would be the worst.

"So you fell in love with a Nazi?" Natasha deadpanned.

"I didn't know what he was for over a year of being with him." I looked over at her, begging her, as a fellow woman, to understand. I couldn't bare to look at Steve.

"Why didn't you leave?" Clint, over in the corner, interjected.

"I tried." I said as sharply as I could muster. "When I found out what he was involved in I tried to run. I made it as far as southern Illinois when I got a phone call."

Rosa quickly moved to me and sat down on the hand-rest of the chair. She was not one for touching, but knew I would need the support for what came next.

"It was Nate, calling from my little brother's phone." I didn't bother stopping the tears from falling when I pictured Mikey's face in my mind. "He was only sixteen at the time. He's always been sickly, I can't even count the surgeries he's had. Nate had his goons take him from school one day."

In a rare moment of softness Rosa put her arm around me and squeezed me into a hug. I tried to control my voice, but all I could think of was seeing Mikey in that hospital bed and the overwhelming guilt that it was all my fault. "They tortured him for days. By the time the police found him he was so cut up and hurt that my mom didn't even recognize him. Nate used him to get to me. I went back to him so he wouldn't hurt my family anymore."

"How did you get away from him?" Steve was standing in front of me, shielding me from Nat and Clint's views.

"The FBI had been investigating him for months. They found his hideout and me in it." I was done. For three years I had tried to come to terms with that part of my life and now I was airing it out for almost complete strangers. My chest physically hurt and my whole body was wracked with sobs. I wasn't in my living room anymore, I was in the dark room Nate kept me locked in for weeks until the FBI found us.

"Why would he want -" Nat started to ask me another questions but Steve silenced her with a sharp look.

"C'mon." I was vaguely aware of Steve picking me up from the chair and carrying me in the direction of my bedroom. He set me down gently on my bed and sat on the bottom corner watching me. I tried to focus, tried the breathing exercises, counted my five objects, but it was him that brought me back. I saw his concerned eyes on me, eyes that had seen countless battles, soldiers, death, eyes that had every right to be hard but looked at me with such softness.

"Steve." I reached for his hand, wanting the gentleness of his touch. "Thank you, for saving me tonight. You really are a good person."

Steve squeezed my hand. "So are you Lucy. Nevermind Nat...she was just doing her job."

"I'm not good Steve." I closed my eyes, embarrassed to be this open with someone, but it was Steve. Something about him made me just trust him. I wanted to open myself up to him. "When Nate died back there...I've been looking over my shoulder for him for three years, and now, within in a few hours I found out he was back and then he's gone. He's dead and I am so relieved. What kind of person is happy that someone else is dead?"

I didn't notice that he had moved from the end of the bed to right next to me until one of his strong arms pulled me to his chest. "You _are_ good, sweetheart." He kissed the top of my head and squeezed me tight. "You've had a lot of bad happen to you, and you survived. And you haven't allowed all of the bad to harden you."

I was silent after that, content to just lay with him and feel him comforting me. That day was exhausting, it had been a roller coaster of emotions and I was spent. I didn't think there were any emotions left in me, I just felt empty. My eyelids started to feel heavy and I knew the right thing to do would be to tell Steve to go ahead home, but I didn't want to do the right thing. I let myself fall asleep to the sound of his breathing and the feel of his hand stroking up and down my back.


	7. Chapter 7

Thank you for the follows and favs, please leave a review as well, even if it's just two or three words to tell me what you think. I personally love this chapter, hope you do too!

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I woke up alone. Rosa had gone to work and there was no trace of Steve, Natasha, or Clint. After the emotional wreckage of the previous day, the time alone was welcome. I video called my family who were all together for a family lunch. Sean was obviously suspicious of my call the night before, but didn't let on anything while we talked as a family. Seeing everyone together made me homesick and I couldn't help but cry after we hung up, even as I marveled that I had any tears left in me.

Feeling more down than ever I blasted some Green Day - my comfort music - and started to deep clean the entire apartment. Something about cleaning has always had a calming effect on me. Physically putting things in order made my mind put things in order, the music was loud enough to drown out my nagging fears, and I was starting to feel more like myself in almost no time. This was all another trick my therapist had taught me, when you can't control your life focus on things you _can_ control.

I was halfway through alphabetizing our substantial DVD collection and singing along to 'American Idiot' at the top of my lungs when I felt a hand on my shoulder. I screamed and turned around with my fist clenched, fully intending to utilize the few boxing skills I had learned from Rosa and Jimmy. Steve caught my wrist easily before I even made contact.

"Whoa there tiger." Steve grinned at me at let my wrists go. I promptly ran over to the stereo and unplugged my phone, throwing the apartment in to silence.

"Sorry I scared you." Steve shoved his hands into his pockets and looked at me apologetically. "I tried knocking, but I guess you couldn't hear me over that."

"What are you doing here?" I may have sounded blunt, but after the disastrous ending of our date, I assumed he wouldn't be back by.

"I want to take you somewhere. You up for a ride?"

"Steve, I'm not so sure that's a good idea." It was the truth. I really liked him, could even see myself falling in love with him one day, but last night just cemented in my mind that my past would always rear its ugly head the moment I was slightly happy.

"I though you might say something like that. Just, give me a chance?" Steve's eyes bore in to mine, begging me to go with him. I just wasn't sure it was right, one or both of our pasts would eventually catch up with us. "Please." He added after a moment of silence.

He had saved my life, stood up for me, and comforted me all in one night. He was trustworthy, loyal, gentle, everything I wanted in a man. This thing between us felt right, but all the facts pointed to us never working out. These thoughts all rang out like a bell in my head but I reluctantly agreed to go with him.

"Change into something less..." Steve paused after I agreed to go and looked at my outfit. "Conspicuous." I looked down, completely forgetting that I was wearing my scrubby daisy duke shorts and hot pink tank top. Classy.

Once I changed to a much more appropriate outfit of jeans and a v-neck t-shirt we were on our way. I held tight to Steve while we rode through town on his Harley, savoring the feel of his abs under my fingers and his strong back against my torso. If this was going to be my last ride with him, I was going to make it count. I ran my fingers up and down his arms when we came to a stoplight and felt a thrill go straight to my belly when I saw it gave him goosebumps.

Too soon, we were coming to a stop outside the Smithsonian American History Museum. Steve pulled a dark blue baseball cap and a lightweight jacket out of his saddle bags and pulled the hat low on his head. "Have you ever been here before?"

I nodded. "My dad brought us here a year before he died. I barely remember it, but I remember how excited he was to show it to us." The memory of my history professor father taking my three older brothers and I through the museum was one of my favorites. I wasn't sure why Steve wanted to bring me there, though.

My question was answered when we came to the feature exhibit, "Captain America: The Living Legend and Symbol of Courage." We both stopped at the entrance, where the name of the exhibit was accompanied by an artist's rendering of Captain America throwing his shield.

"Nat told me about this, but I haven't seen it." Steve was staring hard at the title with his brows furrowed.

"Didn't they need your permission or something?"

A group passed us and Steve leaned in closer to me and adjusted his hat further over his eyes; he didn't want to be recognized. "No, this was all made before I was unfrozen. Dead guys don't sign release forms."

The exhibit was set up in such a way that you followed Steve from his childhood in Brooklyn through his time in the service with the Howling Commandos. The hilight of the exhibit was a set of mannequins wearing the original uniforms of the Commandos with their faces on a mural behind each one.

Early in the exhibit there was a glass podium containing one of his four rejection notices from the army, complete with a list of his physical ailments. "Steve." I nudged his arm and pointed at the paper. "What were you even doing out of the house?"

"Getting into fights mostly." He kissed my cheek and pulled me further into the exhibit. We came to his enlistment picture that had been blown up to a poster size. It barely looked like him, far too skinny and short. The eyes were the same though, even in that small body his eyes were soft and protective at the same time. I glanced over at Steve who was examining a 1940s era army issue motorcycle and wondered if he still saw himself as the skinny kid from Brooklyn.

We reached the part of the exhibit that dealt with his transition to Captain America through the super soldier serum. In the picture here, he was in some sort of metal contraption with electrodes hooked up all over.

"Did it hurt?" I asked, my eyes transfixed on the image.

"A little." He was also looking at the picture, but when I followed his line of sight I saw his focus was on the man to the right of him, Howard Stark.

We kept going through the exhibit. At one point a little boy wearing a Captain America t-shirt recognized Steve but nodded when Steve made a 'shh' motion with his finger. It was dizzying to follow Captain America's story. Image after image and artifact after artifact passed through me. We finally stopped at a final photo at the end of the gallery. Steve wandered off once again, this time in the direction of the memorial wall for Bucky Barnes. The photo I was looking at had also been blown up, it was of Steve, Bucky, and Peggy Carter. The three figures were laughing at a joke unknown to the viewer of the picture. Steve was in his Captain America uniform, but the mask was off. Peggy was looking off camera, perhaps in the direction of the joke teller, Bucky and Steve were glancing at each other around the front of her face. The date on the picture told me it was taken in 1945, this was the last photo taken of Captain America before he crashed a ship into ice to save everyone.

1945\. Over seventy years. Over seventy years ago Steve had stood with his best friends and laughed at a joke. I looked around the exhibit, Steve was still at the Bucky wall, children ran around pointing and awing at the various artifacts, adults stopped and smiled, the words on the walls seemed to dance in front of me, words like 'courageous', 'brave', 'selfless''. The walls felt like they were closing in there were suddenly too many people in the gallery. I ran for the exit door and emerged in the hot spring sun, breathing in deep.

"Lucy?" Steve's voice made me turn around. When he saw I was crying he rushed over to me and pulled me into a hug. "What's wrong?" He pulled back and used his thumb to wipe my tears away.

"I told you I cry at everything." I smiled weakly and pulled away from him. I walked over to the railing and stared out at the beautiful day and the buildings around us. Steve came up behind me and fenced me in by putting his hands on the rail on either side of me. This felt right. His arms around me and his chin resting on top of my head felt so damn right. But what I saw inside just proved how wrong it was. "Why did you bring me here?" I whispered, not trusting myself to not start crying again.

"I wanted." Steve paused and turned me around so I was facing him. "I wanted to show you my life. The world that I knew, this was the only way I could think of."

I put my hand on his cheek and he leaned into the touch. "Everyone you knew, the Commandos, Stark, Bucky, they're all -"

"Dead." He spoke the word I wasn't willing to say. "Everyone but Peggy, and she's on her way now too."

A look of profound sadness settled on Steve's face. He looked tired and confused and a million other things, but mostly, he looked overwhelmingly sad. I threw my arms around his neck and tried to pull him as close to me as possible, trying to comfort him with touch the way he had done to me. He gripped my waist and I was pulled as far on my tip toes as I could go without leaving the ground. He buried his face in the crook of my neck and I could just barely feel wetness where his eyes were, I didn't mind. I just held him. I held him close and tight because I realized what he was going through. Sorrow, guilt; the things that I felt every time I though of my own past.

He pulled away after a long while and I could see his eyes were red. "Two years ago. I woke up in a new world. They told me I had been sleeping for over seventy years." Steve took my hand and lead me to sit on the concrete steps to our left. "They gave me files on all of the Commandos, every single one had a bright red 'deceased' stamp on it. I got to see Peggy, but seeing me sent her into an episode and so I wasn't allowed to visit her for a long while. They told me we won the war, but the government I see now is doing some of the very things I fought against. I went from fighting Nazis and evil scientists to fighting a god and aliens." Steve stopped to take a breath. I hadn't realized how quickly he had been forced to fight in New York in relation to waking up.

"My point, Lucy." He continued on. "Is I don't know what the hell I'm doing. I've spent the last two years isolating myself from everyone because it's easier than trying to understand them. But then I met you."

Steve looked over at me and I cast my eyes down to the concrete to avoid eye contact. "What about me?" I mumbled, not sure where he was going with this. If this was a rejection, even though I was expecting it, I wished he would just get it over with.

"I had to go on a mission the day after the talk at your school. I spent every day of that mission thinking about those gorgeous green eyes of yours, I was so scared you wouldn't be at the coffee shop when I showed up and I wish, I wish you could see what I saw when I walked in and you were there. Then last night. You blew me away, doll."

I looked up at his last sentence, his Brooklyn accent had come out full force the longer he spoke, like Captain America was slowly fading away and all that was left was Steve Rogers. My mom had told me once never to let a man call me 'doll', because a doll was a brainless plastic object that was easily manipulated. But mom had never heard the word from Steve's lips. "Keep talking." I breathily begged him, I wanted to hear more.

"You made me laugh." He started back up again. "You made me feel alive for the first time in two years. That's what matters to me, not your past. Just you and the way I felt holding you while you slept. Where I'm from - _when_ I'm from, when you find a girl like that you hold on to her. I don't know if this is right, if this is how things work between men and women anymore, but I don't care. I have to do things the way I know how to do them, and I decided I'm keeping you."

If it was possible for my heart to beat out of my chest and roll on to the concrete, it would have happened then. All logic escaped me, the things I had been worried about just left my brain.

"If you're alright with all of that," Steve stood up and held both of his arms out towards me. "Then get over here and kiss me."

My body moved before I could tell it to. Within seconds I was on my tip toes again crushing my lips to his. This was more than the sweet kisses from last night. This was desperate, claiming, I couldn't get close enough to him. I wrapped my legs around his waist and he pushed us against the wall, never letting our lips part. My hands were everywhere, clawing at his back, stroking his face, pulling his hair, anything to be closer. We kissed frantically, our tongues dancing in and out of each other's mouths, his hands running up and down my body sending sparks of desire straight to my core. I had known him for a total of two weeks, but the time didn't matter. I was _his_ , that kiss told me there would never be another man.

After a few minutes he pulled away panting slightly, but still supported my body against the brick wall. "So I take it that means you agree?"

"Yes, Steve." I managed to pant out, feeling out of breath from our session. "You can keep me, as long as I can keep you."

Steve smiled and kissed me again, slower this time, full of sweetness.

"You know." A voice behind us made us both jump and Steve quickly pulled away and shielded me with his body facing whoever was talking. It was Natasha, standing with one hand on her hip and looking at us with a shit-eating grin. "Public displays of affection make people uncomfortable."

"What do want, Nat?" Steve questioned her and the red-head's face turned serious quickly.

"We have to get the hospital. Something's happened to Nick."


	8. Chapter 8

After writing this chapter I re-read the story and am laughing that I called it a 'cute little love story'. It's really a 'cute little love story with a dash of kidnapping, espionage, and mentions of torture'. We'll get back to the romance soon though, and get to meet Bucky! I hope you can see how the story is similar to the winter soldier, but with a few key differences. Anyway, please please please leave me a review!

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I didn't know who Nick was, but I could tell it was important to Steve by the way he sped to the hospital. The floor had been completely cleared except for one patient, but people in tactical gear swarmed all over. Steve and Nat went to the observation room to watch the surgery progress. I felt out of place, like an intruder on something I had no right to be a part of. No one questioned me while I sat in the waiting room, but I did get a few suspicious looks.

After an hour the group in the observation room came out and I could tell from the sag of Steve's shoulders that it had not gone well.

"I need to get you out of here." Steve came over and protectively put his arm around my shoulders, directing me towards the exit. We were intercepted by a man wearing something like a SWAT uniform. Steve immediately took up a protective stance in front of me, which didn't go unnoticed by the man.

"Captain. You need to come to Shield for questioning." The man said with a dangerous edge to his voice.

Steve agreed and carefully pulled me past the man. "Nat." He called behind us and Natasha caught up to him.

"I'll get her home."

I was seamlessly passed from Steve to Natasha, who took a hold of my elbow and walked me towards a sleek black sports car. I watched out the window as Steve walked to his motorcycle flanked by armed guards.

"Is Shield what the Avengers work for?" I asked Natasha. She was speeding through town, weaving through traffic, and her lips were tightly pursed.

"You know I can't answer that."

"Is Steve in trouble?" I thought of the armed guards, it almost looked like he was being arrested.

Natasha suddenly swerved into an empty parking lot and stopped the car. She turned to me with a fierce look on her face. I was reminded that she was rumored to be the most lethal member of the Avengers.

"Does it really matter to you if he is?" She asked me harshly.

"Of course!"

"Think harder, Lucy. If Steve is taken away to some secret government prison, if there's a chance you would never see him again, would you do anything to get him back? Would you risk your own life for him? Or are you just with him when it's convenient? Think before you answer."

Natasha and I stared at each other for a long while. The wheels in my brain were turning quickly. I thought of Steve, of the soldier, the skinny guy from Brooklyn, kissing him, hearing him call me his. If there was someone worth risking everything for, it was Steve.

"Yes." I said simply.

Natasha continued to observe me for a long moment, perhaps looking any trace of a lie in my face.

"What can I do to help?" I prompted.

"Take this." She handed me an external hard drive. "Keep it safe until Steve or I show up for it. Don't give it to anyone else, and don't trust anyone else, even if they say we sent them."

I reached for the hard drive but Natasha pulled her hand back. "One more thing." She held my gaze with a look of pure murder on her face. "If you ever hurt him, I'll kill you." After making her promise she handed me the hard drive and continued on to my apartment.

Natasha, I decided, was a juxtaposition. There was Nat, the fun girl from the bar who liked to tease her friends. Then there was Black Widow, the Avenger, the spy. I thought it must be hard for her to function with two completely different people inside. Then again, Steve was the same way. Steve Rogers was Captain America, but the two were not the same. It was probably the same for Tony Stark and Iron Man, and the rest of the Avengers. These people who were sworn to protect us, who had saved the whole world did so with the sacrifice of their own personalities, their own lives.

* * *

I'd seen enough movies and tv shows to know that a hard drive could save or destroy the world so I thought that being the protector of one would be more exciting than it was. It turned out, being the protector of a world changing piece of technology was really boring. I waited around for a couple of hours after Nat dropped me off, expecting Seal Team 6 or something to come bursting through my door any minute. The only excitement was Rosa and Jimmy coming in yelling at each other. Jimmy though Rosa should be taking some leave time after what happened on Friday night.

"You can't just pretend things don't affect you!" Jimmy was yelling when they stepped through the door. I could see this was shaping up to be an epic fight and silently went to my room before they could notice me. I felt a bit like a kid hiding from fighting parents while I listened to them yell. The difference being, I knew they would work it out, they always did.

My phone dinged and an unknown number flashed across the screen with a text message: _Meet at Lincoln now, bring it with you. - Steve._

I got to the cafe and saw Steve sitting at his usual table with a hate pulled low and black rimmed glasses on. The hat read, 'WWII Veteran'.

"That had to be Nat." I motioned to the hat and glasses as I sat next to him.

"We're trying to blend in. She says no one will look past the glasses."

"Works for Superman." I pulled out the hard drive. "Kept it safe for you."

Steve took it and looked at me sadly. "I don't know what happens next."

A car horn sounded twice outside and by Steve's face I knew it was Natasha signaling it was time for them to go. We both started walking for the exit door, a few of the shop's patrons looked at us warily, but no one said anything or made mention of Steve. I turned my face up to Steve's outside the shop.

"Just try to come back to me in one piece, alright?" I fidgeted with the hem of my t-shirt, waiting for a response.

"I don't know how long we'll be gone, it could be a while this time. Everything is..." Steve stopped himself like he was about to give away too much information. "Compromised."

"I'll wait for you, Steve."

Natasha pulled up in an unassuming SUV and looked impatiently over to us. Steve blocked me from her view and leaned down to kiss me. As usual, my entire body responded to his touch with fireworks. "Take care of yourself, Lucy." He kissed me again before turning for the SUV. Natasha gave me a friendly wave and they were off to God knows where.

I felt empty inside as I drove back to my apartment. Moments with Steve were incredible, like slipping into bed after a long day, but they were never enough. I wondered if it would be this way for the rest of our relationship, a brief moment of joy followed by separation and the gnawing worry that _this_ would be the big bad that finally got him.

A cop car pulled up behind me and threw on its lights and sirens. I looked down at the speedometer, I was going five miles over, usually not something to be pulled over for. In my rearview I could see the cop sending my plate number in through his radio, it seemed to take longer than normal and I started to get nervous. I was just about to call Rosa and see if she could do anything when three huge black SUVs with police lights boxed my car in. A crowd of people in bullet proof vests surrounded my car and pointed their rifles at me.

"Out of the car, slowly, hands on your head." The man closest to me ordered.

I did as I was told, a crowd had started to gather on the sidewalk. "Ms. McAuliffe, I'm Agent Rumlow, you are being brought in for questioning by the Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement and Logistics Division for suspected contact with the fugitive Steve Rogers." S.H.I.E.L.D, I put together the acronym in my head, this was who Steve, Clint, and Natasha all worked for. This was the agency behind the Avengers, why were they arresting me? I was placed in handcuffs and not so delicately shoved into the back seat of one of the vehicles.

We rode in silence for what felt like an eternity. I had no idea what was going on. Why had he called Steve a fugitive? We arrived at a somewhat nondescript government building and I was marched to a police interrogation room, or at least what a police interrogation room looked like on tv.

"Ms. McAuliffe." Agent Rumlow fastened my hands to a bar on top of the table. "You're not in trouble."

"Then why am I being chained up like this?" I shot back at him.

"It's just procedure." My jaw dropped when Agent Holt walked in the door. "That's enough Rumlow, I can take it from here." She smiled at Rumlow and sat down across from me with a large file in front of her.

"Lucy, I had a feeling I would be seeing you again soon."

"I take it you don't really work for the FBI?"

Holt smiled and shook her head. "I'm sorry for the deception, but I want you to know you can trust us. We're the good guys in all of this. Now tell me, when did you last see Steve Rogers and Natasha Romanoff?"

I stayed silent. I knew I was a terrible liar and didn't want to accidentally give anything away. Instead, I studied Holt. She was getting up there in age, maybe looking at retiring soon. Her left ring finger had an indentation in it, showing she regularly wore a wedding ring. The crow's feet around her eyes tilted down and one side of her lips drooped just ever so slightly from a scar that lead down to her chin.

"This will really go a lot easier for you if you cooperate." She said calmly, with just a thin veil of a threat in her voice.

"I want a lawyer, I know my rights." I continued to study her, her dark brown eyes lit with amusement when I spoke.

"I think you'll find some of those rights don't apply currently. We are dealing with a terrorism case, after all. The Patriot Act allows us to... get around some of those pesky laws."

"I'm not. Telling you. Anything." I spoke slowly, trying to sound tougher than I knew I was.

"Oh honestly, is some guy really worth going to prison?" She rolled her eyes at me. I continued to just stare at her blankly.

"Very well." After another few minutes of silence Holt started up again. "I had hoped to spare you the pain of seeing this, but I'm afraid you leave me no choice."

She opened the folder and slid it over to me. Staring back at me was a picture of my father, his staff i.d. from the University of Chicago.

"What is this?" I demanded, my blood was starting to boil, what did my father have to do with any of this?

"Just read it." Holt sat back in her chair and watched me.

Underneath his picture a caption read: Dr. Martin McAuliffe, historian. S.H.I.E.L.D consultant. Status: Deceased, assassinated.

"This is wrong, my father died in a car accident." Holt rolled her eyes again and motioned for me to keep reading. The next few pages were summaries of Dad's research, the hidden history of the Nazi party, Hydra and the occult, ancient origins of Nazi and Hydra beliefs, all the things that had interested me in the same subject. He had even begun to name every ex-Hydra who defected to the States, one name in particular stood out to me. Dr. Arnim Zola. He was a Hydra scientist who was experimenting with his own version of the super soldier serum, he defect to SHIELD. I kept sifting through the files, my inner researcher taking over. One of the last pages was an image of my father in Berlin dated the night of his accident, the summary of his death was on the following page. A handwritten note read, 'Hydra = S.H.I.E.L.D.' The pieces were starting to form together in my mind.

"Hydra killed my Dad." I deadpanned and looked up to Holt. "Hydra is SHIELD."

"Yes, Hydra has infiltrated SHIELD, you and your father were both right."

My stomach leapt up to my throat once the gravity of the situation hit me. "Why would you show me that?" It didn't make sense for Holt to be telling me this. She was admitting that she, and maybe even the whole organization, were Nazis. "Nate didn't escape did he?" The thought sickened me. I knew what Nate was capable of, if Steve hadn't have saved me that night...

"We have been watching Captain America for quite some time. When he reacted the way he did to you, we knew we found his weakness. Unfortunately, eager Mr. Turner completely failed in his first mission with us; to bring you in."

"Why are you telling me all of this. I'm not going to tell you anything now!" I started tugging at the cuffs around my wrists, desperately trying to slip through.

"You needed to know how serious we are." Holt opened a laptop screen and I saw six boxes, one for each of my family members. My mom was in her kitchen, Mikey in his bedroom, my other brothers were each at work, and my sister, Megan, was sitting in her living room with her son. "We have an agent trained on every member of your family. They'll be taken out one by one until you tell us where the Captain is."

"No! Please, God no!" I yelled and reached for the screen.

"I think we'll start with the scarred one." She pointed to Mikey. "We'd probably be doing him a favor, really."

"I don't know where they are! Please, Steve didn't tell me anything, I swear!"

Holt smiled and smoothed a flyaway gray hair, she pulled my cell phone from her briefcase and slid it over to me. "I suggest you get him here." She paused and cocked her head at me. "And don't try tipping him off to anything, you won't like what we do to scarface if you do."


	9. Chapter 9

I needed to get the events of Winter Soldier out of the way so I could continue on with my own story, so this is a bit of a transitionary chapter. I do have a question for you all, the next chapter has a *scene* between Lucy and Steve. Should I change the rating of the whole fic for that chapter (there will be more sex later on in the story too) or do I just put a warning at the top of the chapter and keep the rating? Let me know, and be sure to review!

* * *

I wish I could say I hatched a plan to save Steve and my family, but that would be a lie. I tried calling Steve almost right away, but he had used a burner phone and I had no way of contacting him. I was put in a cell covered with metal and glass walls, the monitor showing my family was placed outside the cell for me to constantly see.

"We're not in the business of killing people who don't deserve it." An older man wearing a nice three-piece suit walked into my line of site. "I'm Alexander Pierce, I sort of...head all this up." He smiled at me, he looked like a politician.

"Let my family go." I said evenly, not breaking eye contact. "I don't know how to get a hold of Steve."

Pierce laughed. "Captain America? Not a concern anymore, or at least he won't be. We found him."

My stomach plummeted and I felt all the color drain from my face.

"Why am I still here if he's dead?" I had to force out the last word. It was impossible that someone or something had actually successfully killed Steve.

"Do you think you're only as useful as the man you're with?" Pierce opened my cell and sat down on the bench opposite me. He clearly didn't see me as a threat. "You are still here, because you can do something maybe no one else can." He pulled a notebook out of the briefcase he had carried in. "You can decipher this."

He handed me the notebook and I slowly opened it. Inside was page after page of my father's handwriting, I would have recognized the spidery lettering that covered the lines anywhere. The bulk of the writing was in German, but there was also Russian, Hebrew, Spanish, Hieroglyphics, and even Cuneiform wedged into the corners.

"Your Dad never trusted me, not like I got others to trust me." Pierce started talking after giving me a minute to rifle through the notebook.

"Well he was an excellent judge of character." I couldn't help the snarky comment from rolling off my tongue. Pierce ignored it and continued.

"I had him working on decoding and translating the old Hydra files, under the guise of SHIELD intelligence, of course. He gave me his reports, but I always felt like he was leaving something out. After his death, I found this in belongings. It's his own personal enigma code, I've had all the best codebreakers working on it, but none of them have been able to read it."

I heard what he was saying, but it wasn't registering exactly. I was already consumed by the notebook, after one glance I was able to identify the patterns in the writing. Dad had raised all of us kids to learn how to break codes and decipher secrets. He even hid our Christmas presents every year and we had to go around the house looking for clues to their location. This was one of his games, one he left knowing I would be able to solve.

"You solve the mysteries of that notebook, your family goes free and you can put this all behind you."

"What if I can't solve it?" I looked up from the notebook into Pierce's calculating eyes. He glanced over to the monitor.

"Then I guess your old man would have died for nothing." The threat was clear. Solve the code or my family dies. He stood up to leave the cell but left the door open. "You'll find access to everything you need in the laptop in that briefcase."

There was no way of telling how much time passed in that cell. I know at one point they brought me food that I didn't eat, I asked to be taken to the bathroom approximately an hour after that, at some point I fell asleep on top of a pile of my own notes and the notebook itself. I was quickly learning the patterns, but the translations were still a mystery at some points and when I could translate them the words didn't always make sense. I was sure not to write down too much on my own notes until I could figure out what to do. My father had kept this a secret for a reason. If Hydra wanted the notes, if was no doubt for something nefarious. Dad died for whatever was in this notebook so there was no way in hell I could just hand the information over to them. At the same time, the lives of everyone I loved were at stake.

I jolted awake when I heard a loud voice come over the intercom speakers.

"Attention all S.H.I.E.L.D. agents, this is Steve Rogers." I woke up fully. Steve was alive! "You've heard a lot about me over the last few days. Some of you were even ordered to hunt me down. But I think it's time to tell the truth. S.H.I.E.L.D. is not what we thought it was. It's been taken over by HYDRA. Alexander Pierce is their leader. The S.T.R.I.K.E. and Insight crew are HYDRA as well. I don't know how many more, but I know they're in the building. They could be standing right next to you. They almost have what they want. Absolute control. They shot Nick Fury. And it won't end there. If you launch those helicarriers today, HYDRA will be able to kill anyone that stands in their way. Unless we stop them. I know I'm asking a lot. But the price of freedom is high. It always has been. And it's a price I'm willing to pay." Steve paused here for a second. "And if I'm the only one, then so be it. But I'm willing to bet I'm not."

"Steve!" I yelled out for him, stupidly hoping that he could somehow hear me.

"Is all of that true?" One of my guards pointed his gun at me. He looked to young to be in the position he was, barely older than twenty. "Is what Captain America said true?"

I raised my hands to my head defensively. "Yes, it's all true. Hydra has taken over SHIELD."

The guard didn't lower his weapon right away. I could tell he was fighting an internal battle, deciding if I could be trusted. After a few tense moments he finally lowered the weapon. "Get your stuff." He ordered me, but a split second later I saw blood shoot from his forehead. Rumlow was standing behind him holding a pistol.

"Time to do things my way, let's go Mrs. Rogers."

I screamed and he had me in handcuffs before I could even try to run away. We walked through the building, it was pure chaos. It seemed most everyone was trying to run out of the building, I noticed fights breaking out everywhere, no doubt between Hydra and those loyal to SHIELD. We reached the top floor of the building. I saw Pierce, Natasha, a group in suits, and a man wearing an eyepatch and a long black trench.

"You need to keep both eyes open." Trench coat was saying to Pierce as revealed a mangled eye under the patch and accessed a database using retinol scan.

"I wouldn't do that, Nick." Rumlow pushed me forward and held his gun up to my temple with his other hand tight on my neck.

Nick? From the hospital?

"Do you really think there will be anywhere you can hide if you kill Cap's girl?" Natasha calmly stepped away from the computer she was at and crossed her arms.

"This is bigger than me, Romanoff." Rumlow sounded on the verge of crazy, just like Nate had right before he killed himself. "Hydra is bigger than all of us."

I thought back to the museum, the picture of Steve's transition into Captain America. He lost his best friend and the life he should have lived to protect the world from Hydra. I was a coward if I did any differently. "Nat." I nodded in her direction, giving her permission to let me die. Telling her to keep doing what she was doing.

"I find it ironic of you to be self-sacrificing." Rumlow squeezed my neck harder. "Ask your friend _Natasha_ about Operation Goodnight. Ask her about how she killed your father."

"Enough!" Nick raised a gun and shot Pierce, then Rumlow. Rumlow fell to the ground but I could tell from the gurgling noises he was making that he was still alive. Natasha gave me a wary look, but kept typing on her computer.

I was in shock watching her work, but a sudden noise outside the window drew my attention. A giant hellicarrier was crashing into the Potomac. My mind was on auto pilot, it registered to me that Steve had to be on that ship or he would have been in this room, whatever Hydra had been trying to launch was on that carrier. I started running towards the exit, ignored my burning lungs and aching legs until I emerged into the bright morning sun. Once outside the building I could see clearer where the ship was crashing, I had to get to Steve. Despite the aches in my body I took off again in the direction of the ship until I came to the shore of the river.

People along the sidewalk were stopping and pointing at the ship, some screaming and running away. I crossed over the protective rails and shrubbery, trying to get to the river as quickly as I could. The logical side of my brain told me there was nothing I could do, that it was stupid to run _towards_ the giant ship crashing into water, but I kept moving forward. I had to find him. A glint of metal momentarily blinded me, it was coming from the water. I paused to take in my surroundings and realized I had run to a secluded area of the bank, there was no one around me. The metal blinded me again and I looked for its source. There, in the river, were two bodies. Two men, one was holding the other by the shirt and dragging him to shore. The metal, I realized, came from the one man's arm. I followed the metal arm down and saw a blue uniform and blonde hair.

"Steve!" I yelled out from the shore and started running for the water. The man dragging him pushed his hand out to me in warning and I stopped. Reluctantly, I pulled my eyes away from Steve's body and looked at his rescuer. His dark hair slightly obscured his face, but somehow, I recognized him. I had seen him in the photos at the museum.

"Bucky?" His sharp blue eyes darted to mine as he reached the shore. I gasped when dropped Steve and stared at me. It was definitely Bucky, definitely Steve's best friend and brother. He looked lost and confused, like he didn't quite know where he was. He turned and kept walking up the bank. "Wait!" I called after him but he didn't stop, just kept walking away. I tried following him up the hill, but by the time I reached the top he was gone.

Steve started coughing up water and I ran to him. I couldn't tell the extent of his injuries, but it looked bad. His whole face was a bruised, bloody mess and his right arm was stuck at an odd angle.

"Bucky?" He gasped out.

"He's - he..." I tried getting out through the sobs starting to overtake me.

"Lucy?" Steve reached up with his left hand. I grabbed it and pulled it to my cheek, wanting to feel him close.

"I'm here. I'm here, Steve."


	10. Chapter 10

I have been so excited for you all to read this scene! I did change the rating of the fic to m, it's not as explicit as other stuff on here, but I'm also paranoid. Enjoy and as always, please leave a review!

* * *

"You don't have to do that, I'll heal." Steve pulled his head away from the alcohol soaked cloth I was cleaning the cuts on his face with.

"I know." I forced his face close again and continued to clean. "I just need something to do with my hands."

We were in Steve's apartment that I didn't even know he had. A day had passed since the battle of DC, as the fight between SHIELD and Hydra was quickly coming to be known as. A doctor from SHIELD had looked Steve over and set his arm, he was going to be fine, the break was minor and after only twelve hours he already had almost complete mobility. After getting checked out Steve had wordlessly brought me to his small, tidy place. We were both exhausted, Steve had collapsed on the bed almost immediately and slept for hours, I called work but no one was there, all the schools had been released early anyway so people could be with their families. The destruction of the city was still yet to be totally seen, but it wasn't looking good.

Steve grabbed both of my wrists in one hand and took the cloth away from me. He was sitting up on his bed and I was standing between his legs. He was still in his Captain America uniform, although it was worse for wear, covered in dirt, blood, and tears. His shield was nowhere to be seen, he said he dropped it battling the Winter Soldier - Bucky. I had noticed blood on my shirt when we got to his apartment and started to panic, not even knowing who it belonged to, so I was wearing my jeans and one of Steve's t-shirts.

"Lucy." He said my name quietly and pulled my body closer to his, placing his head on my stomach. "It was really him."

I knew he was talking about Bucky. When he was dragged by SHIELD agents from the river bank all he could do was ask for Bucky. No one saw where the Winter Soldier went, he was practically a ghost.

Steve lifted my torso so I was somewhat sitting on his lap at the edge of the bed with my knees bent down and straddling him. The position lined up our torsos and made me just slightly taller than him. It was the most intimately we had touched yet and despite my fatigue my body hummed with excitement.

"What happens now?" I asked and put my arms around his shoulders.

"I'm going to go after him." Steve tightened his grip around my waist. I knew hunting for Bucky would take him away, maybe for a long time.

"I'm going home." Steve looked up at me. "I'm going to back to Chicago to try to decipher my dad's notebook. I have a few friends left at the University who might be able to help me."

"What about your job here?" Steve's voice was gravelly.

"I'll miss it." I closed my eyes, thinking of my students and my coworkers. I would really miss the school. "But now my family has almost been killed twice because of me. I want to be near them."

"It wasn't your fault, Luce. None of it." Steve moved his right hand to the back of my neck and squeezed it reassuringly. I ignored his comment, of course he would say that, it was the right thing to say. I knew the truth, though. First Nate and then yesterday, I had nearly gotten my family killed.

"Lucy." Steve said my name more firmly and held my gaze with his eyes. "Don't even go there. Don't put that on yourself."

"How can I not?"

Steve sighed and creased his eyebrows. He didn't have anything to say, he was blaming himself too. I knew he somehow blamed himself for not looking for Bucky after he fell, he told me as much the night before.

I leaned forward and gently put my lips on his, trying to find and give comfort. The kiss intensified and Steve pulled me tighter to him. He pulled his lips away for a split second but then started peppering kisses along my jaw and down my neck. Goosebumps broke out wherever he put his lips, and my hips involuntarily rocked into his, causing him to gasp. With a growl, he gripped my hips and rolled us over on the bed so he was laying on top of me.

We continued kissing each other fervently, our hand moving everywhere on each other. I gripped my hands in his hair and he nipped at my neck with his teeth, causing me to groan. I felt his hand sneak under my shirt and run up my ribcage, stopping just below my breast. I panicked, however, when his hand moved across my sternum and touched the scar there. Without thinking I pushed him away scuttled to a corner of the bed.

"Lucy!" He was immediately alert. "I'm so sorry, I took it too far." He looked down at his hands and my heart started to break.

"No you didn't." I scooted closer to him, wanting to get back the intimate moment we had just shared. I sat in front of him with my feet tucked under me and chewed on my lip. My mind, body, and heart were all in overdrive. I wanted this. I wanted him. But no one had ever seen...

"Steve." I took his hands in my own and he finally looked up at me. "I want you." I said honestly. "But I haven't..." I wasn't sure how to have this conversation, my therapist had taught me how to break down all my mental barriers but this one. "Not since Nate, and he..." I trailed off once more, not wanting to say it out loud, not wanting to go back to that _place_ in my head.

"He hurt you." Steve finished for me.

I nodded with tears pooling in my eyes. "I haven't shown anyone before." I started to pull the hem of my shirt upwards but Steve stopped me.

"You don't have to do this." He held my gaze for a few intense seconds. I knew he was absolutely telling the truth. He wanted me, the slight bulge I felt earlier and the way he kissed me told it was true, but he wouldn't take without my permission.

"I want to, Steve. I want you to see all of me." I thought for a moment, "You're the first person I _want_ to see."

I reached again for my shirt, but Steve's hands stopped me again. "Let me." He said, and I lowered my hands away.

Slowly, almost agonizingly slowly, he peeled off my shirt and gently pushed me so I was laying down once again. I waited with baited breath for his response. No one but me and the doctors who treated me had ever seen the extent of the scarring Nate gave me; from the raised 'NK' over my right ribs, the cigarette burns, and finally the giant gash nearly covering my right side where he had tried to slash me open the night his hideout was raided. They were ugly scars, not the cute kinds with cute stories of falling off your bike as a kid. They were a reminder of what that monster had done to me, a reminder that I had let myself fall for him.

Steve didn't move for a long while as he took in my torso and I started to feel uncomfortable. When I moved to cover my right side up with my arm he moved and gently kissed the 'NK', then the burns - every single one, finally he came to the slash and kissed it too then moved back up to my face. "You are so beautiful." He whispered against my ear. I closed my eyes and turned my head away, scared that I would see a lie in his face if I looked at him. He moved my chin towards him with his forefinger. "You have battle scars, doll. Why would you ever think I would think differently of you just because I saw proof of your bravery?"

I still had my eyes closed and didn't respond, unsure of what to say and how to react, still a little scared he was just trying to make me feel better. He kissed me on the lips, softly, with no sense of urgency, like we had all the time in the world. "Open your eyes." He whispered to me and I obeyed. My green met his blue and I thought if I could somehow suspend time and live in that single moment I would.

"I want you." Steve finally broke the silence and stroked my cheek. He moved his hand down my neck towards my breasts. "Is this ok?" He paused, waiting for a response.

I arched into his touch. "Yes. Please, Steve." I spoke in barely a whisper, afraid that anything above that would ruin the spell that had been cast between us. "I want you too, so bad."

Steve smiled down at me and ran his hand lower until he reached the button of my jeans. The snap and successive sound of the zipper caught me off guard, brought me back to reality, this was really happening. He shimmied my jeans off of me and stood up off of the edge of the bed. I was laid bare before him, just my bra and panties left on. He however, was still in his grimy uniform. I stood up and pulled on the zipper in the back, it was a surprisingly complex process, but I eventually was able to peel off the top half. His entire torso was covered in bruises and cuts, Bucky had done a number on him. It was my turn to take care of him. Methodically, I was able to take off the rest of his uniform and kissed each bruise and scratch. I knew that the serum would make him heal quickly, but it pained me to see him hurt.

He walked us back to the bed and gently positioned himself on top of me once again. I pulled my panties down and unfastened my bra. Steve wasted no time in discarding the garment and immediately palmed my breast, eventually rolling one nipple then the other between his fingers. I could feel his erection pressing towards me and I opened my legs up for him.

"If you want to stop..." His voice was husky, he was physically holding himself back from me.

"Dammit Steve." I let out a frustrated growl. "Don't you dare stop now."

He chuckled and leaned down to kiss me again. "I mean it, stop me...if I...If it hurts."

"You could never hurt me." I kissed him back and reached between us to pull him inside me. We both sighed and visibly relaxed at the contact, like druggies who finally got our fix. Neither of us moved for a while, just enjoyed being so completely connected. After an eternity, Steve pulled out just slightly, then pushed in once more. The movement woke me up out of my stupor and I clenched my nails into his biceps, needing to feel closer. Our movements became more erratic, each of us kissing and biting and grabbing for one another, constantly needing _more._

Steve suddenly pulled us into a sitting position so I was riding him and his arms circled completely around me. "Steve, I'm going to-"

"Wait for me." Steve pressed our foreheads together, both of our bodies were slick with sweat.

"Steve!" It was torture trying to hold out for him, I was rapidly reaching the point of no return.

"Now Lucy, let go."

I allowed myself to stop holding back the minute I heard Steve speak. He clutched me to himself so hard I would certainly have bruises, but it didn't matter. We both held on tightly to each other as wave after wave of pleasure overtook us. At some point, Steve fell backwards on the bed and brought me with him so I was straddling him.

When we both calmed down I moved to get off him but he held my hips in place.

"Just stay." He said breathlessly. "Just a bit longer."


	11. Chapter 11

I was really unsure about this chapter, I'm still working on creating effective transitions from one point to another. I see quite a few people are now following, which is awesome! Please leave me a review as well if/when you hit that favorite/follow button, it really encourages me to get feedback from my readers. Thank you for sticking with me! I'm really excited about what's coming up in the next few chapters!

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He was still partly inside of me and I rested my head on his chest. Steve slowly ran his hand through my hair, breathing deeply. I dozed off for a few moments and woke up under the covers. Steve was walking back to the bedroom, now in a pair of dark boxer briefs, and I motioned for him to join me on the bed.

"You look mighty pleased with yourself." I laughed and kissed him lightly. The grin on his face was infectious.

"I was just thinking." He kissed me back and put his arm around me. "I can't believe I waited ninety-five years for that."

I pulled back and felt my jaw drop to the floor. What he just said wasn't clicking. "I...you were..." I leaned in and whispered, feeling a bit scandalized. " _That was your first time?"_

Steve then did something I didn't think was possible; he blushed. "Was it that bad?"

"Are you crazy?" I pulled my jaw off of the floor. "It was...I don't have a lot of experience, and what I do have wasn't necessarily good...but it's never been like that. I've never been that...connected."

We both laid on on the bed facing each other, our hands intertwined between us. Steve's face suddenly turned white and his eyes got as big as saucers. "Oh shit! Was I supposed to use a condom?"

I couldn't help but burst out laughing at his sudden realization. It took me a while to recover and I was clutching my belly with that wonderful pain that comes from laughing too hard.

"What?" Steve asked innocently, still worried about his apparent misstep.

"I'm sorry, I wasn't laughing at you, just the face you made. We're fine, I have an IUD." I managed to calm down.

"What does that mean?" Steve still looked confused.

It occurred to me that all of his education about the 21st century probably didn't include revolutions in women's health. "It means that I have a tiny metal contraption inside me that makes my life awesome. No periods and no pregnancy fears, at least for five years."

Steve's face relaxed. "I love the future."

I laughed at his joke and started kissing him again. Feeling lighthearted after laughing so hard I crawled on top of him and pinned his arms down. Of course, there was no way I would ever actually be able to do that, but he let me have my fun. "I kind of want to keep you in this bed indefinitely. You have a lot learn, _Captain."_

Steve smiled again and effortlessly flipped us over, playfully smothering me with kisses while pinning me to the bed. "I don't think I'll ever get enough of you." I screamed when he tickled my left side, loving this previously unseen side of him. He hitched my leg up to to his waist and ran his hand down my thigh while the other held my wrists above our heads. We started kissing intensely once again, our lips all over each other. Steve started to travel further south and I was more than a little shocked when he took one of my nipples between his teeth, for a novice, he knew exactly what to do.

A loud knock filled the whole apartment. Steve closed his eyes and came back to my face. Someone was at the door, we heard the knocking again.

"Maybe if we ignore them they'll go away." I kissed him and ran my fingers through his hair.

"If it's Nat she'll just shoot down the door." Steve groaned and reluctantly rolled off of me, as if on cue the banging on the door become more insistent. "Give me a damn minute!" He yelled out and starting searching around the bedroom for our clothes. He was dressed in sweatpants and one of his tight workout shirts in under a minute and put my clothes on the bed. "Get dressed, sweetheart." He kissed my temple and headed out of the bedroom, closing the door behind him.

I didn't want to get dressed. I wanted to stay in bed and wait for him to come back and spend the next week making love. If Nat was at the door, I really didn't want to get dressed and go out front. With everything that happened, I had not taken the time to process what Rumlow told me about my dad, I hadn't even talked to Steve about it. I reluctantly got dressed and was about to open the bedroom door when I paused to listen and see if, indeed, Nat was there.

"All my aliases have been compromised, I need to go underground." It was Nat's voice, like a bucket of ice water over me.

"I'm going to be re-building SHIELD and hunting the last of Hydra, you know I could use you, Captain." I vaguely recognized the voice as that of Nick, the director of SHIELD.

I hesitantly opened the door, unsure if I was meant to hear any of this, but if they had questions for me I had to put aside my own feelings and face them.

"Sorry, Nick." Steve was saying when I walked into the living room and stood by his side. When he notice me, he put his arm protectively around my waist. "I'm going to find Bucky, Sam too." Steve cocked his head towards a man on the other side of him that I had not seen before.

"You might not want to pull too hard on that thread." Nat shook her head and looked from Steve to me, I wasn't sure which of us she was talking to more, then settled on Steve. "He's not the same man you remember."

"If even one percent of Bucky is still in there, I have to get to him." Steve said resolutely.

"He pulled him from the water." I added for Steve's benefit, wanting everyone to know that I stood behind him.

"And will you be joining these two on their hunt?" Nick gazed at me with his one good eyes. He was an intimidating man, it was like he was looking into my very soul. If I hid behind Steve like I was wanting to, Nick and the others would see me as weak, just the Captain's girl, that wasn't going to happen.

"No." I stepped out from Steve's grasp, but he kept his had resting on my lower back. "I'm going to finish my dad's journals."

"Which brings us to one of the reasons I came here. We're going to need those back." Nick took a step towards me, playing the intimidation game.

"Absolutely not." I glared up at him. "They are my father's intellectual property."

"They are the _property_ of SHIELD." He shot back.

"Which was infiltrated right under your nose by actual Nazis!" I stepped forward again and started to feel my blood boil, he was not going to get those notebooks. I was vaguely aware of Steve tensing behind me and Natasha lightly placing a hand on her gun. The tension in the room could be cut with a knife.

Nick suddenly started laughing. "I like her, Cap." He addressed Steve behind me. "I'll make a deal with you, Lucy. Work for me, take your dad's old job."

I stepped back, not expecting that. I looked back at Steve and tried to ask him with my eyes if Nick was trustworthy, if he was alright with this. Steve gave me an almost invisible nod, just a slight tilt of his chin, but it told me everything I needed to know; he trusted Nick.

"What exactly would that entail?"

"I can't tell you that until you accept." Nick folded his arms across his chest.

I thought for a moment, a mysterious job with an organization that bare existed anymore? Sounded crazy, but my dad had done it, and accepting would mean I could learn more about the life he lived that I never knew about. The decision was really made for me. "I accept."

 **Eight Months Later**

Winter in Chicago is gorgeous. I crunched through the snow between buildings on campus. It was pretty, the circle campus of the University of Chicago looked like a wonderland, but it was still cold. I pulled the hood of my parka down and covered my mouth with my scarf to help me breathe better, when the wind chill was this cold it gets hard to take in a breath. Finally, I got to the building I was looking for and and dove for the interior warmth even as a gust of wind brought a pile of snow inside with me.

"Why do we choose to live where the air hurts our face?" I started to take off my outer layers and set them on an empty chair in my brother, Roddy's office

"Because Mom and Dad refused to live anywhere else, and we inherited that stubbornness." Roddy barely looked up from his work to acknowledge me. His sandy hair was tied back in a 'man bun', and he was hunched over his desk with his glasses about to fall off the end of his nose.

"Made any progress?" I plopped down next to him in a swivel chair and he finally looked up.

"Since yesterday?" Roddy's comment dripped with sarcasm. "Still just line after line of numbers."

SHIELD gave me permission to use Roddy as a translator in Dad's notebook. He had followed our dad's footsteps and was a history professor at the University of Chicago. He was also quickly becoming one of the foremost experts in ancient languages. With his language skills and my knowledge of all things Hydra we had managed to decipher about one-third of the journal, but were stuck on a series of pages that were filled with Phoenician numbers. They were randomly placed and didn't correlate to anything else we had found.

What we were able to translate until then lead SHIELD teams to various Hydra facilities and resulted in countless arrests. While he worked for SHIELD Dad had learned about the Hydra infiltration and set to work cataloguing evidence as to what Hydra was doing and who was involved. We learned through various sources that he was about to present his findings to the SHIELD director when he came home from Berlin, but was killed before the opportunity presented itself.

Roddy and I were filled in on all of this, but the rest of our family was kept out of the loop. As far as they knew, I was working at the University to try once more to get my degree. "If we're not going to get anything else done we might as well leave." I glanced at the clock, mom would half-kill us if we were late for Christmas Eve dinner.

By the time we got to the house chaos had already erupted. Our brothers, Sean, Ryan, and Mikey were in the middle of what looked like an epic snowfight. A rogue snowball crashed into Roddy's face. "'Bout time you two showed up!" Ryan yelled and signed for benefit of Mikey.

 _"Mom was about to call in the National Guard."_ Mikey signed to us before being tackled in the snow by his best friend, Zared, who had been hiding behind a snowbank. The two of them were inseparable growing up, that had doubled after Mikey was attacked. We all accepted Z as another little brother.

Dinner was a raucous affair as usual. With their four kids running around Ryan and his wife, Katie, announced they were once again expecting. My sister Megan and her fiancé announced they FINALLY had a date for the wedding pinned down. At one point Mikey and Z started throwing rolls at each other in a continuation of the snowball fight from outside. We were all crammed in my mom's small dining room, the adults at the same dining table we had grown up eating on, and all the kids at a folding table between the dining room and kitchen. As usual, Mom had so many decorations up it looked like Father Christmas had thrown up. Nat King Cole and other favorites poured from the speakers.

I leaned back in my chair and watched the wonderful mayhem around me. My thoughts drifted to Steve. We were able to send emails back and forth, he even called me two months back, but it wasn't enough. I missed him, I hated that he left so soon in our relationship, but I understood why he had to. I had my family, he needed to go get his.

"You're being awfully quiet." Mom spoke and signed over to me. At home, we all usually spoke with words and ASL so Mikey was never left out. He was eighty percent deaf in one ear and one hundred percent in the other.

"She's probably thinking of her soldier boy." Megan shouldered me playfully and shot me a sly smile. My family knew I was seeing someone, it was impossible to keep it from them. However, they only knew I was dating someone named Steve and he was in the army.

"He should have leave time at some point, shouldn't he?" My Mom smiled at me, trying to cheer me up.

"Yes." I said cautiously, I was always tight lipped about Steve. "But there's no telling when, he's spec ops."

"Well he'd better get back soon, you're not getting any younger!" Ryan joked and was promptly hit in the shoulder by his wife which started a new round yelling, talking, and general insanity.

Everyone gathered around the giant Christmas tree and exchanged presents, the kids were instantly racing around to show each other their new stuff and pondering out loud what Santa would leave for them to open in the morning. My mom brought out her infamous eggnog that was guaranteed to give everyone a hangover. Everyone settled in for our yearly sleepover. It was a silly tradition really, especially now that we were all grown up, but every year we pulled the couch cushions to floor in front of the tree, blew up air mattresses, and slept in a giant pile on the floor. I think we mainly kept it up because Mom loved it so much, all her babies and grandbabies together.

I, however, needed some alone time and wanted to check for any word from Steve or SHIELD. I went to my bedroom and opened my laptop. A few messages from Rosa, nothing from SHIELD, and there at the bottom a message from Steve.

 _Dear_ _Lucy,_

 _I miss you. We're doing well here, but I'm tired of the cold. I want to be back in bed with you in my arms. I should be able to see you soon, in fact, some days the thought of seeing you is all that keeps me going. Merry Christmas!_

 _Love,_

 _Steve_

My heart fluttered even as I rolled my eyes at the cheesiness of the message. When we were first separated he had signed, _sincerely_ , then after a month of exchanging emails it had suddenly changed to _love_. I spent way to much time over-analyzing that before signing mine the same. The truth was, I was in love with him, probably had been from the moment he walked into that coffee shop.

No one ever bothered telling him an email and a letter are not really the same thing, so all his messages sounded like that. He also wasn't able to say where he was in case someone hacked our messages, so they were also always vague. One month ago he had sent his shortest email to date, it simply said; _Found him._ Everything since then was short and far between, it touched me that he sent me a Christmas message. I clicked reply and started to type.

 _Steve,_

 _I miss you too. My family is all here tonight, I have a house full of people and all I can think about is how much I wish you were -_

The sound of the doorbell cut me off. Who in the world would be visiting this late on Christmas Eve? It rang again and I heard the distinct thundering footsteps of one of the twins - Sean or Roddy - running downstairs to open it. Someone called my name, maybe Roddy? It was hard to tell the twins apart unless they were standing right in front of you. I pulled a heavy knit sweater over my leggings and tank top and headed for the door, irritated that I wasn't able to finish my message.

You know the feeling when two parts of your life that never meet suddenly merge? Like when you run into someone you only see at work at a friends barbecue, that weird dissonance that just throws you off. That's what happened to me. I took in the uniform first. Still spangled, but dulled substantially, more tactical looking than the last time I saw it and now with a brown leather jacket over it and a harness on his back for his shield. His head was mask free, but his hair had grown longer a shadow of a bear graced his face. I knew him, I knew what I was looking at, but it wasn't clicking that he was standing in the entryway of my family home. My whole family had gathered at this point and were staring at him just as wide-eyed as me.

"Luce." Hearing my nickname on his lips woke me up and I ran over to him. It didn't matter that my entire family was present, I jumped in his arms and crashed our lips together.

One of the boys cat whistled, probably Z. I very unwillingly pried myself away from Steve and turned to face my family. Before I could even say anything Ryan mocked me in a high-pitched voice. " _My boyfriend Steve is in the army_."

Then Megan joined with, "Bitch, your boyfriend _is_ the motherfucking army!"


	12. Chapter 12

Here's some Christmas cheer and the beginnings of some action! Thank you to those that have reviewed, you made my day! Please leave me a quick review and let me know what you all are thinking of the story so far.

Also, I am terrible at summaries, and I hate the one I wrote for this story. Let me know if you can think of a better one.

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I managed to wrestle my family into leaving us alone and dragged Steve to my dad's old office. I had initially started to my room, but Ryan yelled "no boys in the bedroom" up the stairs at us. We sat down on the blush leather couch I used to take naps on while Dad worked.

"Sorry, my family is a little..."

"I think your family is great. You can see how much you all love each other." Steve leaned back in the corner of the couch.

"What are you doing here? I just got your last email." I sat on the opposite corner with my legs in his lap.

"I figured as much. We flew into New York this morning, and I just kept going. I wanted to see you for Christmas."

"What about Bucky? You never said anything after telling me you found him."

Steve sighed heavily and ran his hands down his face. "He was in Romania." He leaned forward and kept his palms on his forehead. "He managed to slip his Hydra handlers and was living in a tiny apartment in Bucharest."

I reached over at rubbed Steve's back, whatever had happened was clearly weighing heavily on him. "Does he remember anything?"

"A little." Steve sat back up and reached for my hand. "He remembers the war, a little bit about growing up. He remembers everything Hydra made him do. But he says he only remembers snapshots, just bits and pieces of his life."

I tried to imagine what that would be like. To have two different streams of memories in your head. "Where is he now? Did he come back with you?"

"Sam, Buck, and I hunkered down in Bucharest for a while, but Hydra found us, so we went to Siberia where Bucky remembered he had a safe house. Nat met up with us there just a few weeks ago and...aggressively convinced us to come back to the States." He squeezed my hand and kissed my knuckles.

"So what is he doing now? Is he going to be alright?"

"Yes and no. He's not going to be the same Bucky that I knew, but he's doing better. Banner and a whole team of head doctors are working on him now, I can't be away from him for too long." Steve relaxed into the couch and pulled me to him so both his arms were wrapped around me.

"Banner as in...?"

"Bruce, The Hulk, ya." Steve kissed the back of my head. "God it feels so good to have you back."

I closed my eyes and enjoyed the feel of him around me, we sat in comfortable silence for a time, enjoying being together. The door to the office opened and my four year old niece, Maggie, walked in while trying to balance a large mug.

"Gamma said your friend should have some hot chocolate." She shyly handed Steve the cup who took it with a wide smile.

"That was so sweet of you, Maggie."

She smiled and crawled into my lap, facing Steve. "Do you like Aunt 'LuLu?"

"I do, very much." Steve kissed my forehead and Maggie made a yuck sound.

A sudden crashing noise sounded outside the window and Steve jumped up immediately alert. I however, knew exactly what had happened and opened the window to see Z and Mikey gripping the second story ledge. They crawled in through the window with guilty looks on their faces.

"You two were spying on us?" I signed and spoke.

 _"To be fair, I couldn't hear anything."_ Mikey signed and Z burst out laughing.

"I suppose you also sent poor little Maggie in to distract us." I put my hands on my hips and looked at them sternly.

Steve was laughing at their antics. "Who is this?" He spoke and to my surprise, signed as well.

Mikey's face lit up, the scars that ran from each corner of his lips up to his cheekbones prevented him from fully smiling. _"You speak sign language?"_

Steve signed back. _"A little."_

" _This_ ," I motioned to the boys. "Is my little brother Mikey and his friend Zared."

"Sorry about eavesdropping." Zared gave me the smile that usually got him out of trouble with teachers, parents, police, and everyone else.

 _"That we were caught."_ Mikey signed back.

Maggie's mom came and took her back to bed and shuffled the boys back to the living room. Leaving us alone once again. It was close to two o'clock in the morning, but I didn't even feel tired, I didn't want to miss one moment with Steve. Various family members interrupted us every ten to twenty minutes or so, probably on Ryan's orders. The house finally quieted down around 3:30 and I was just starting to doze off on top of of Steve's chest. His shield was on the floor propped against the couch and he had covered me with his jacket. The sound of shuffling feet and giggling woke me up.

"Ryan I swear to God if you wake up the kids again..." Mira, Ryan's wife was saying. I peaked my head out the door to see what was going on. Mira, Ryan, Megan, and her fiancé, Collin were carrying packages downstairs. Their kids would be excited to see "Santa's" presents magically appear in the morning.

"Hey LuLu, how's soldier boy?" Megan winked at me. I pulled a face at her and looked back, Steve was sleeping deeply.

"I'm still mad you lied to us." Ryan was balancing a large box wrapped with Disney Princess paper on his shoulder.

"I didn't lie!" I whispered and closed the office door behind me, joining them in the hallway. "His name is Steve and technically, he is in the army!"

"Sign me up for the next war!" Mira joked, earning a sound of protest from Ryan. I let the four of them continue their work and headed for the kitchen in search of a glass of water. My mom was sitting at the island watching the snow fall outside.

"Merry Christmas, sweetie." She turned to me and gave me a wide smile. My mom was a superhero in her own right. After dad died, she took on the task of raising six rambunctious kids herself plus working as a kindergarten teacher full time. Even though her difficult life was starting show in her blonde hair that was slowly turning silver and the wrinkles around her eyes, I never once heard her complain. "Is your friend sleeping?"

I rolled my eyes and sat down next to her with my water, she never called any of our significant others boyfriends or girlfriends - just 'friend'. "Yes, he's in the office, I thought I'd spare him the McAuliffe Christmas pile."

My mom chuckled and sipped her hot tea. "I remember when your dad would come home on leave he would be so tired. One time he slept for a whole day straight through. That was when the twins were toddlers and I got so mad that he was able to sleep through all of their noise." She stirred her tea and I could tell she was lost in memories of dad. I leaned my head on her shoulder and breathed in the scent of her perfume. If two people defined soulmates, I was sure it was my parents. Mom still loved him deeply and I knew the holidays were the hardest for her.

"I remember when he came home from his last tour." I began, thinking back to that winter so many years ago. "I was maybe five and Meg was just a toddler. He wrapped his dog tags and put them under the tree, when I opened it the next morning he said he wouldn't be needing them back." The chain was locked up in a wooden memory box in my room.

"That was one of my happiest Christmases." Mom started running her fingers through my hair. "You know, sweetie, it's hard to see your man leave for duty, but it doesn't last forever." I knew she wasn't talking about Dad anymore but the super soldier sleeping upstairs.

"I think it might for him, mom." I let the tears fall. I couldn't picture any point in the future when Steve wouldn't be flying off to save the world, we would probably never get to be normal.

Mom kissed my cheek and wiped away my tears. "Then you need to cherish the time he is with you. Go get some rest, you're not going to oversleep and miss mass like you did last year."

I went back to the office after checking in with the sleepover. Ryan gave me shit in a hushed tone for not staying in the living room with them, but everyone else was asleep. Steve was still sleeping when I got back, only now he was on his side with his back against the back of the couch. I slid in between his arms and tried to sleep.

We woke up to the excited yelling of the kids. Steve changed into a pair of sweat pants and t-shirt that was in the small rucksack he had brought with him and we headed towards the tree. The kids were running around playing make believe. Judah, Meg's son and the oldest of the cousins at eight years old announced that he was Iron Man and pretended to shoot a laser at Maggie.

"They're pretending to be the Avengers?" Steve looked towards the game with a bewildered expression on his face.

"You're obviously not around kids much." Mira handed me a cup of coffee. "ALL kids pretend they're the Avengers."

Sean caught Maggie when she ran past him brandishing a new 'magic wand' Santa had brought her. "Does that make you Black Widow?" He asked while tickling her, she wiggled from his grasp.

"No Uncle Sean, I'm Loki!" She pointed the wand at him. "Die human!"

Mira's face turned bright red as she watched her daughter's antics, but Ryan laughed and picked her up. "It's the universe's tiniest villain!" He blew a raspberry on her belly and dangled her from her ankles. "When my daughter grows up and inevitably tries to take over the world and you have to stop her, just please remember how adorable she was at this age."

Steve laughed an knelt down so he was face to face with a still upside down Maggie. "Loki of Asgard," He said seriously but with a giant smile on his face. "I'm afraid I'll have to take you in."

Ryan released his hold on her and she took off screaming and yelling 'you can't catch me Captain America' towards her brothers while Steve and Ryan laughed. My heart melted seeing Steve act so natural with my family.

We all dressed for church - Steve had to borrow clothes from Sean - and headed out. The service was a typical Christmas mass, and were late which was also typical. Mom sat between Z and Mikey and cuffed their ears a few times for acting up. I sat next to Steve and Roddy. My favorite part of church has always been the stained glass windows. I watched red and blue light dance across mine and Steve's joined hands and reveled in the peace of being with him on the holiday.

"Jesus Christ!" Next to me, Roddy suddenly exclaimed and eyes of every parishioner turned to us in the back row.

"Is Lord." Ryan finished while Sean dug his elbow into Roddy's side. Roddy pinched my leg to get my attention and started to rapidly sign.

 _"They are coordinates!"_

 _"What are?"_

 _"Phoenician numbers."_

I gasped, picturing the pages in the notebook.

 _"Let's go."_ Roddy signed and started to get up to leave but was stopped when my mom grabbed his wrist.

"Roger McAuliffe!" She whisper yelled at him. "You sit down!"

He reluctantly sat but I saw his knee bouncing up and down for the rest of the service and when it was over he bolted out. Steve and I met him in the parking lot and he filled us in on this train of thought once we were all in his car headed to the university.

"Dad said Hydra had secret weapons, those have to be the coordinates to them. I was looking at the globe in the sanctuary and it just struck me."

We rushed to his office and pulled out one of those giant world maps they used to have classrooms. He read off the first set of numbers and I pinpointed them on the map; the middle of Siberia, not even worth having a city name.

"That's where they kept Bucky." Steve joined me at the map.

"Who?" Roddy brought a pin over and stuck it to the map.

"Nevermind now, keep telling me coordinates."

Roddy listed the next set; Kamenz, Germany. Near Dresden. He kept listing and pinning until we accounted for each set of numbers. Red dots were spread across Europe and the Middle East, except for one.

"DC." Steve looked worriedly at the single dot in the United States.

"If the first dot is where they kept Bucky, could that be the location of others like him?" I asked Steve.

"There's only one way to find out." Steve replied, "We can start in DC."


	13. Chapter 13

Welcome to my new story followers! Let me know what you think! Just a quick note about the characterization of Roddy. I have never written an LGBT character before, I myself am straight but I'm basing his experiences on the experiences of friends (with permission). If I get something wildly wrong about the LGBT experience or something just seems incredibly wrong/offensive please let me know and let's have a constructive dialogue about it. Anyway, lots of action coming up and 'action' between Lucy and Steve in the next chapter. Leave me a review!

* * *

I was nervous. Meeting your boyfriend's best friend is always a little nerve wracking, but meeting your boyfriend's best friend who also happens to be a brainwashed master assassin is downright terrifying. I worried that I would say or do something wrong and manage to completely ruin everything.

Roddy and I were in the apartment I shared with Rosa; she and Jimmy were on vacation. We had somewhat deciphered what was in the notebook and Steve decided the job ahead of us was too big for the three of us so he called in Sam, Bucky, and Natasha. We were waiting for him to come back from picking them up from the airport and Roddy was obsessively checking and double checking his work.

"I think it's a series of clues." He announced from his spot sitting at the island with the notebook and other pages spread across it. He pushed his wire frame glasses back up his nose. "Dad didn't want anyone to be able to have this information at once, so I think he left breadcrumbs for himself."

"Or for us." I sat down next to him and looked at the pages. "If he knew Hydra was after him maybe he put all this together in a way that only the people used to his little puzzles would understand."

"I still can't believe he was murdered." Roddy sighed and ran his hand over the top of his head. I avoided eye contact with him. I had filled him in on Dad's involvement with SHIELD and how he was killed, but left out that I knew who had apparently killed him. Natasha's involvement was something I actively avoided thinking about, I hadn't even told Steve yet, a fact that was gnawing away at my insides.

The door to the apartment opened and Steve ushered in his group. "Is it really that hard to just move a seat up?" One of the guys was complaining as they walked in. Suddenly filled with spies and superheroes, the place felt too small. Steve came over to me, kissed my head, and put his arm over my shoulder.

"Roddy, this is Natasha and Sam." He paused to allow Roddy to introduce himself. "And this is Bucky." Roddy moved to shake Bucky's hand and I saw the slight shift in his body language, the way his eyes looked the assassin up and down, it was small enough that only someone who knew Roddy well would notice; he was attracted to the man.

"Buck," Steve moved me forward so I was face to face with his friend. "This is my girl, Lucy." I glanced over and Steve had a wide smile on his face, he was proud to be introducing me to his best friend.

Bucky grinned back and him and shook my hand. "Remind me to tell you stories of trying to get Stevie to even talk to a girl."

"Now that I'm looking forward to." I laughed with Bucky and was put at ease. It may have been risky but I reached in and hugged him. "Thank you for saving him." I whispered in his ear and pulled back, Bucky dipped his chin at me slightly, acknowledging that he remembered me at the river bank.

My impression of him was...conflicted. He was wearing a black ball cap, dark jeans, a red henly, and a dark jacket. His black hair was long enough to fall out the bottom of the hat and he kept his left hand tucked in to his pocket. His eyes constantly darted around the apartment even as Roddy started filling everyone in on what was going on. Even though Bucky paid attention and involved himself in the conversation, his muscles remained taught and he kept himself positioned where he was facing the door. He was a man waiting for an attack at any moment, but trying act normal. Although he looked no older than his late twenties, his real years showed through on his face and in his eyes.

"Do you really think Hydra would be able to keep a weapon hidden there?" Nat was looking over Roddy's work.

"The coordinates are right there, Arlington." Roddy jabbed his finger on the paper to make a stronger point.

"I looked up the exact coordinates and went there this morning." I moved from where I was standing next to Steve and joined them at the island. "It's a grave, Lieutenant Otto Eydt, died 1944. I did a rub engraving of the headstone and found this." I pulled the carbon paper from the pile and handed it to Nat.

"Otto Eydt, born 1915." Nat read out loud. "Died 1944. Then something in Greek."

"The Greek translates to 'cut off one head, two more shall take its place." Roddy explained.

"Hydra." Bucky growled out and glared at the piece of paper.

"Are we really talking about digging up a grave in _Arlington National Cemetery?"_ Sam asked and looked around the room.

"I don't like it anymore than you do, but it's what has to be done." Steve came to the head of the table and everyone turned to him. "Nat, Lucy, and Roddy, you three will be on lookout. Maria Hill agreed to help us with the surveillance cameras. Sam, Bucky, and I will do the actual digging. We'll head out as soon as it gets dark."

"I need to be on the dig crew. There's a certain way it should be done." Roddy protested.

"Have you robbed a lot of graves?" Bucky cocked his head towards him and I saw Roddy slightly smile.

"I'm an archaeologist, that's literally my job."

"Fine." Steve continued on. "Sam you'll keep watch."

Sam nodded but didn't look happy about it. I drifted back to my room while the guys kept talking theories about what we would find tonight. Rosa had turned my old bedroom into an office, but the view of downtown DC was the same. I looked out the window and marveled at how quickly my life had changed in less than a year. All because of a damn cup of coffee.

"Knock knock." Steve was in the doorway. "You disappeared on me." He walked in and shut the door behind him.

"Sorry, I just needed to get away for a few minutes."

"You don't like being in groups of people." Steve observed and joined me at the window.

"I don't like being in groups of people who are arguing." I corrected him. "I get tired of people talking and not coming up with any real answers."

"So you'll never be a politician." Steve joked, then became serious. "What's going on with you and Nat?"

"Noticed that, did you?" Steve nodded and lifted an eyebrow at me, waiting for me to explain. I looked down at my hands. "Rumlow told me something about her when I was captured by Hydra." I chewed on my bottom lip, the truth right on the tip of my tongue but I didn't want to tell him. "I - can't tell you what, not right now, because I'm not ready to."

Steve furrowed his brows and glared at the floor. "I don't like secrets, Lucy."

"I know." I put my hands on his shoulders. "And I hate keeping this from you, but please, let me deal with it first."

Steve's face softened and he circled his arms around me. "Just promise me it's nothing that will get you hurt."

"I promise." I kissed him lightly, glad it was at least somewhat out in the open. "I really like Bucky." I changed the subject.

"I'm glad. He still has a long way to go." Steve paused. "Roddy likes him too."

My eyes shot up to his immediately, so I wasn't the only one who noticed. "Steve, you can't tell-"

Steve shushed me. "Don't worry, I don't think Buck or anyone else saw, I'm just extra sensitive to the way people are. Especially around him"

"Roddy's been out for a while, but he doesn't advertise it, it's sort of an...open secret." I tried to explain, hoping Steve would understand.

"Things are a lot different for guys like that now. In the 30s and 40s we wouldn't even be having this conversation."

"Yes, but we were raised Catholic, and Mom is real conservative. No one in our family cares, but Roddy, well he still struggles with who he is sometimes." I thought back to when Roddy had tearfully come out to our family. We all accepted him with no questions asked, but he still was always self-conscious, always hesitant to talk to anyone - except for maybe Sean - about his preferences.

"C'mere." Steve pulled me back towards him and kissed me passionately, his tongue slipping into my mouth and his hand gripping the back of my head. "I wish we were alone." He whispered in my ear.

"We could send them grave robbing without us." I joked and ran my hand down his abdomen, earning a moan from him.

* * *

"Everyone in position?" Steve's voice sounded in the small earpiece I wore.

"I'm good." Sam's voice was next followed by a whooshing sound as he flew above us, circling high enough that he could barely be seen.

"We're good to go, I just took out the guards." Natasha crouched down next to me in the gazebo above where the guys would be digging. Below us, Bucky, Roddy, and Steve started to dig up the earth. Even with two super soldiers, it was a slow process.

Nat and I sat in silence for a while, me watching the guys and she watching the surrounding area through binoculars. My stomach was roiling with anxiety, I knew I needed to talk to her, needed to learn the truth. "Is it true?" I finally blurted out.

Natasha lowered the binoculars and looked over at me. "Is what true?"

"Operation Goodnight."

Nat sighed and sat back against the railing of the gazebo. "I was wondering when you would bring that up."

"I need to know the truth, Nat."

"I didn't know if it was true or not, when Rumlow told you." Nat kept her gaze on the distance, looking for danger. "I've killed a lot of people."

"You don't - remember them?" I was bewildered.

"I do, I remember them all. But I don't remember missions, just faces. Your dad, he had an open face, he tried to help me, said he had a daughter around the same age as me." Natasha looked over at me briefly.

"You couldn't have been much older than ten." I whispered, hoping that my voice didn't shake too hard.

"I wasn't. He was one of my firsts."

"Was it Hyrda?" I tried to stay calm, but I was sure Nat could hear my heart beating.

"I don't know. What I was raised in -" Natasha closed her eyes like she was trying to block out the memories. "We were just told who to take out and when."

"And you don't work for that anymore?"

"Clint got me out, actually. Are you going to try and kill me now?" Natasha raised the binoculars back up to her face, it was as if the conversation wasn't effecting her.

"Why would I do that, it wasn't your fault." I was crying silently, for my dad and for the little girl who had been forced to do something terrible.

"I killed your Dad, don't you hate me?" Nat turned and looked at me, looking confused.

"You were a victim just like him, just like Bucky and millions of others who have been fucked with by evil people. I don't hate you, I - I'm sorry you had to go through that."

Natasha took a breath in like she was about to say something but never got the chance. Sam's voice came through the coms, "We've got company."


	14. Chapter 14

Thank you so much to everyone who has favorited or followed. Here's a nice long update for you. Also, the latter half of this chapter was really inspired by the song 'Tightrope' from The Greatest Showman. If you're interested, I have a spotify playlist of all the songs that are inspiring either certain scenes or the general tone of this fic at user/1249424923/playlist/6fxLXAfFTR9t7HkbwJfKWp

Please make my day and leave me a review!

* * *

Everything happened way too fast. I looked out from the gazebo and saw about a dozen men in tactical gear approaching the grave.

"Do NOT shoot to kill." Steve's voice sounded in my ear. "Repeat, incapacitate only, these could just be cops doing their job."

"You know how to use one of these?" Nat handed me a small handgun.

"Point and shoot, right?" I had never held a gun in my life, but how hard could it be.

Nat nodded. "More or less. Stay back until one of us comes for you." She jumped over the railing and headed for the attackers. I saw Steve and Roddy stand with their hands up while Bucky silently circled behind them, strategically positioning himself to the side of oncoming force.

"My name is Dr. Roger McAuliffe." Roddy said loud enough that even I could hear him from my vantage point. "This is for research, I have my credentials -" He didn't have a chance to finish because at that moment gunfire started to ring out.

"I don't think they care, doc." Nat came over the coms and I could see her jump on the shoulders of one of the men and bring him to the ground. Steve jumped out of the ditch they had made and was back to back with Bucky fighting off attackers. Roddy turned back to the grave and continued to dig. Sam was on the edge, taking on two opponents. I felt completely useless but kept my small gun pointed out. Someone grabbed me from behind and pulled the gun from my grasp. It was thrown over the gazebo.

"Don't scream." The voice said into my ear, it was familiar.

"Rumlow?" His hand was over my throat and I felt the barrel of a gun jammed to the side of my head.

"Let's go sweetheart." He started to march me towards the melee, the others had for the most part managed to take down all the others.

"Get out of there, doc!" I heard Bucky yell.

"I almost have it!" Roddy was still in the ditch and I saw Bucky jump in after him and crush through the dirt with his metal hand. He came out with a wooden box and shoved it towards Roddy.

"Hey Captain America!" Rumlow shouted over the last sounds of the fight. He cocked the pistol and jammed it further in my temple. Everyone stopped and turned to Rumlow and I. Bucky raised his rifle to Rumlow but Steve motioned with his hand not to fire. I had to do something, I didn't know what I could do but I couldn't just stand here and let something bad happen. Around us, the other men were starting to come to and surround us once again. "Looks like you're out of luck." Rumlow turned towards Roddy. "I'll take that box, doctor."

"Over my dead body." Roddy snarled out.

"Bad word choice." Bucky turned towards Roddy who shrugged.

Rumlow shifted slightly, the standoff continued. I saw my opportunity and took it, it was a cheap shot, but what I had been taught in the couple of women's self-defense classes I had taken. I brought my foot up backwards and kicked as hard as I could between Rumlow's legs. The shock was enough to make him falter and pull the gun away from head, allowing me to escape his grasp.

"You cunt!" He yelled through the pain and raised his gun towards me. Something slammed into me and I saw a flash of shiny metal in front of me. I looked up in time to see Bucky push me back and attack Rumlow who was already being disarmed by Natasha. Steve and Sam were taking out the last of the other men who had started to stand up. Sirens sounded in the distance.

"I think it's time to go." Steve appeared out of nowhere and pulled me to his side. We took off running and made it out of the cemetery just as multiple police flooded the area.

* * *

Back at the apartment Roddy placed a large wooden box on the island and jiggled the lock on it. Bucky made to crush the lock with his metal hand but Roddy stopped him.

"Stop! We don't know if it's booby trapped. You could open it and poison gas could leak out or something." Roddy pushed his glasses up and leaned closer to the box. "There's some marking on here." He grabbed a pen and paper and started to copy down what he was looking at. "Looks German, LuLu, come tell me what this says."

I came up and looked over the paper. "You mean to tell me you can read hieroglyphics but not German?" Bucky leaned back against the counter and eyed Roddy dubiously, his dark hair falling like a curtain over his face.

"Do you mean to tell me you read German and not hieroglyphics?" Roddy lifted the corner of his mouth at Bucky.

"Hoffnung für die Menschheit." Bucky read out loud.

"Hope for mankind." I translated and looked closer at the box. "And that's the emblem of the Third Reich."

"What is a Nazi box doing in Arlington?" Steve crossed him arms over his chest and glared at the box, trying to figure out the puzzle.

"Have you heard that phrase in any other Nazi stuff?" Roddy directed his questions at me. I thought through all the books and primary sources I had read.

"Himmler said something similar about the Final Solution." I brought the image of the letter Heinrich Himmler had written to Hitler to the forefront of my memory. "He told Hitler that the genocide of the Jews was only the beginning, that his way of killing would reduce the population and be the hope humanity needed."

"So there could be plans for a genocide in there." Nat spoke up, eyeing the box.

"We don't know unless we open the damn thing." Bucky made another move towards the lock but Roddy pulled it out of his reach.

"Pandora." Roddy said suddenly, now holding the box. "It's like Pandora's box."

"That's the one where the girl let all the bad stuff in the world, right?" Sam asked.

"Yes, but what was left in the box was hope." I added, now understanding where Roddy was going with this.

"Or," Roddy set the box back down and looked over all of us. "Deceptive expectations. Depending on how you translate it."

"Could we x-ray it?" Sam asked and Roddy glared at him as if he had just suggested killing a puppy.

"No we can't x-ray it! We have no idea what's in there! The radiation could damage the box or it's contents, or cause a reaction with any chemicals inside! The Nazis were known for turning anything into a weapon -"

While Roddy was distractedly ranting Bucky came up behind him and smashed the lock, the lid popped open.

"Scrolls." He said, pulling out a handful of parchment.

"Ooh, I love scrolls." Roddy's mood instantly changed and he eagerly took the artifacts from Bucky. "But you still could have killed us all." He furrowed his brows at the ex-assassin who just glared back.

Roddy unfurled one of the scrolls across the island. It was covered in Egyptian hieroglyphics and some geometric patterns along the side. "This is going to take a while to translate." My older brother was staring at the scrolls with a look of pure awe. "There are at least three different dialects here, and those patterns on the side aren't Egyptian."

"Well, seems like you have this under control now." Nat hopped up from her barstool and headed for the door. "I'm going to debrief Fury on what's happened."

"I thought he was on the run?" I looked over, confused.

"He is." Nat winked at me and took off.

"I'm heading out to. This is all way out of my area of expertise, call if you need me." Sam walked over to Steve and gave him a manly hug back slap thing that all guys do with each other.

"I have some things to pick up at my old apartment." Steve held my hand and walked us towards the door. "Buck, can you keep an on things here?"

Bucky was leaned nonchalantly against the kitchen sink, his black tactical gear and one-armed jacket made him look like a foreboding figure. He turned to Steve and nodded once.

"You good?" Steve asked and Bucky nodded once more. It was an unspoken communication between them. Steve was making sure Bucky was Bucky and that the fight at the cemetery hadn't awoken the Winter Soldier; Bucky was letting his friend know he was in control of himself. The amount of trust between them was astounding.

Steve was almost silent as he drove us to his former home. Every once in a while he would glance over at me and I saw a muscle in his jaw twitch. Whatever was happening with him, I didn't dare make it worse by saying something. By the time we got to his apartment, though, I was losing my patience.

"What's wrong?" I finally broke the silence after he locked his door and walked through the whole apartment looking for any signs of intrusion.

He collapsed in one of his living room chairs. "I froze." He dropped his shield and looked up at me.

I tried to figure out what he was talking about. "Like, seventy years ago...or -"

"No." I saw him slightly smile despite himself then turn serious again. "At the grave when Rumlow had you. I froze and Bucky had to save you, if he hadn't been there..."

"I like to think I sort of helped save myself." I walked to him and sat in his lap, straddling his legs.

"You could have died." He breathed out and rested his forehead on my collarbone. "And I didn't do anything about it. I've never..."

"You were scared." I rubbed the back of his neck, trying to show him that it didn't matter, that I was fine.

"Fear shouldn't have stopped me from acting." Steve pulled away, his voice resolute. "Lucy, look at everything that's happened to you since you met me." He eased me off of his lap and started pacing the living room.

"Shut up." I stopped his movement and put my hands on his chest, one on either side of the star decorating his uniform. "Don't follow that train of thought."

"How can I not?" He put his hands around my wrists and pulled away. "I can protect everyone, but not you. I might save the whole world but it wouldn't matter if something happened to you. And if you're with me, something _will_ happen." He turned his back to me and studied the wall.

"So are you saying you don't want me with you?" A rush of anger and fear tore through me.

"No!" He swung around rapidly and looked me in the eye. "I've never wanted anything more than I want you, even when I was younger and met -" He stopped and for a moment I knew his mind was drifting back to World War Two. "It doesn't matter, though." He shook his head to clear his thoughts. "You deserve better than this. Better than getting shot at, you deserve a house and a family and _normal_ and I can't give that to you."

"That's what you think I want?" I heard my voice rising and threw up my hands in frustration. "I don't _need_ any of that to be happy."

"You say that now but someday -"

I cut him off before he could finish. "You think that I want, what? A house in the suburbs with two point five kids and a golden retriever? Steven Grant Rogers how dare you assume to think for me."

"Lucy, you don't understand, you're too young."

That really set me off. "Too young?! Let me tell you something, _Captain America_ might be almost a hundred, but Steve Rogers isn't even thirty and you are acting just as clueless as every other guy your age. It's not even about you, even if you were to end this now I still wouldn't want normal, not now and not someday. After everything that's happened I can't go back to my old life. I don't want to!"

Steve let out a frustrated growl and ran his hand through his hair. "And what happens if Bucky isn't there next time? What happens the next time I see you with a gun to your head and am too fucking scared to move? Or, what happens if you survive and go back to Chicago and I stay on mission? Can you really live like that? Because there is always going to be another war for me to fight, another enemy to take down. I can't ever quit, can't settle down. I used to think I could, when I first took the serum, I thought I could go home and start a family and just be _normal_ but that guy went into the ice seventy years ago and someone else came out."

This was an unknown side of Steve. His face was red and he was clearly angry, his voice shook with barely contained rage. My thoughts immediately slipped back to when Nate would lose his temper and I took a step back on instinct, but I also noticed that through all his anger, Steve kept his hands firmly fisted at his sides.

"I didn't know _that guy._ " I started calmly, trying to diffuse the situation. "But I do know the guy who spent the better half of year trying to save his best friend, the guy who actually liked a terrible remake of an Audrey Hepburn movie, who made a point of seeing me on Christmas even though he had to be beyond exhausted from his mission, the guy who has taught me that I am so much stronger than I ever thought and made me feel beautiful for the first time in three years. That's the guy I want, I would follow him anywhere." The color on his face was starting to return to normal and I saw his breathing even out. I continued, hoping he would see my side. "Steve, from the moment I found out my Dad died my life hasn't been normal. I've been tortured and hurt beyond belief, normal isn't in the cards for me and I'm happy with that. I want the adventure and the danger, I want life on a tightrope and preferably with you."

"Lucy." Steve said softly, all traces of temper gone, as wrapped me in a warm hug with my head against his chest. "If something happens to you...I wouldn't come back from that."

I reached up and kissed him softly. "But you can't keep me so far from danger that I don't get to live. I deserve to help the good fight just as much as you do."

"Lucy, I-" Steve pulled back slightly so he could see my face. "I love you."

I gasped. There it was, out in the open. I could feel his heart beating rapidly under my hand as he watched me, waiting for a reaction, maybe even scared of my response.

"I love you too." I said the words, but it wasn't enough. Those four words were just not enough to really make him see what he meant to me, how much every fiber of my being just wanted him. His lips crashed into mine and I melted into him.

We managed to walk back to the bedroom while kissing and groping at one another, constantly needing to be closer. "Steve," I said between kisses while trying to tug off the top half of his combat uniform. "You think you could have Stark design something easier to get off of you."

Steve laughed and finally pulled off his shirt and pants himself. "Please don't ever mention Tony Stark in bed again." He lightly pushed me on the bed and undid my jeans, tugging them off of me and throwing them to the floor. "Take off your shirt."

"Sir, yes sir." I mock saluted and stuck my tongue out at him, earning a laugh. Within seconds my shirt was crumpled up next to my head.

"I love the way you look like this, spread out just for me." Steve said huskily as he looked down at me, his boxer briefs fully tented. He lifted my left leg and kissed my calf, then kept running kisses all the way down my leg until he reached my inner thigh. Once there, I felt his tongue caress up to my bikini line and run back down where he lightly bit me. He looped a finger into the hem of my panties and moved them to the side, I could feel his breath right at my core. "Is this ok? Do you want me to keep going?" He asked.

"Fuck, Steve. Please keep going." I panted out and arched my hips towards him.

"Language." He chuckled and I was about to give him a smartass reply but then I felt his tongue run over _that spot_ and any comment was drowned out by a cry of pleasure. He continued to run his tongue over my clit while one hand ran up my torso and reached my left nipple, with his other hand he teased at my entrance with one finger.

"Please." I moaned, rocking my hips forward.

"Please what, Luce? I want to hear you say it."

"Make me come, I want to come." I managed to gasp out. Steve redoubled his efforts, finally pumping one, then two fingers in me while still licking. I felt a coil in my lower belly constrict and I relaxed into it, moaning and maybe screaming when it finally snapped. Steve sat back on his haunches and watched me come undone.

When I finally came down from the high he leaned over me and started kissing his way up my stomach and over my breasts, stopping to take a nipple into his mouth. "You have no idea how much it turns me one to see you like that." He whispered once he got closer to my face.

I reached down and pulled his freed his his cock from his briefs. "I think I have a pretty good idea." I teased and stroked down his substantial member that was rock hard. "I want you inside me now, Captain."

"Ma'am, yes ma'am." He kissed me and slammed inside me all in one go, making me cry out once more.

My hands floated above my head and I felt him hold my wrists together with one hand. "Is this ok?" He murmured into my ear. Oh, he had no idea how ok it was.

"I love it." I managed to get out, another orgasm rapidly approaching.

This wasn't like the first time we made love, this wan't sweet and exploring, Steve wasn't careful with me. He set an almost punishing pace and I met him with ever thrust. We were claiming each other, make each other our own. Steve let my hands go and I instantly raked my nails down his back, trying to pull him further into me if it was possible.

"Mine," He hissed out, I knew his own orgasm was rapidly approaching from the erratic thrusts of his hips. "My Lucy."

Hearing those words did it for me. I saw stars and felt him slam even further into me, spilling himself inside me. He collapsed on top of me, barely holding all his weight off of me before rolling to the side and tucking me in next to him.

"Damn." I heard him mutter.

I smiled to myself and looked up at him. "Language."


	15. Chapter 15

Thank you to my reviewers, KittyBear98, SilverShadowWolf46, chrisihoeg(who's been with me from the beginning), supesfan18, AmericanNidiot, and musicluver246, you guys rock! I'm so excited for what's coming up in this story. Please leave me a review and let me know what you think!

* * *

Steve was still asleep when I woke up at the crack of dawn. I cleaned up in the bathroom a bit and made a pot of coffee. He was still sleeping when I got back to the bedroom and I couldn't help but stand and watch him. He had kicked the blankets almost totally off of himself and was laying on his back with one hand curled around the corner of the blanket and the other on the pillow above his head. He wasn't Captain America anymore, just my Steve. My Steve who loved me. We left a lot unsaid after our argument the night before, but I wasn't going to be the one to bring it up. When he shifted slightly I noticed the growing bulge under the sheets and came up with a wicked plan.

I crawled in under the sheet and took his semi-hard member in one hand and licked down the shaft, earning a moan, but he still didn't wake up. I swirled my tongue on the tip and took as much as I could in my mouth, he was big enough that I had to supplement with stroking the shaft with my hand.

"What the-" The sheet was pulled off of me and I looked up with his cock still in my mouth. I released it with an audible 'pop'.

"Good morning." I said coyly, wrapping my hands around his member. I took him once again in my mouth and started to bob up and down, allowing him to feel the back of my throat.

"Lucy..." He gritted out, putting his hand in my hair. "You don't have to - ah fuck!" He gave up trying to talk once I managed to deep throat him completely by relaxing myself. He started to lightly thrust into my mouth and tangled his hands deeper in my hair. "Oh my god, don't stop." He panted out between desperate thrusts and moans. I was instantly hooked on this, on making him so completely unraveled.

"Lucy, I'm going to come." He started thrusting wildly and I took all that he had to give, swallowing every drop.

"Good morning." I repeated and scooted up next to him. "There's coffee ready."

"God, I love you." He smiled big and kissed me. Just when he started running his hands down my sides my phone rang.

"Why does this always happen to us?" He whined.

"That could be Roddy." I got off the bed and searched for my phone. Steve came around and landed a playful spank on my rear end before heading towards the aroma of the coffee.

"Roddy, what's up?" I finally found my phone and answered. Steve came back in with a cup and motioned for me to put it on speaker phone.

"You and soldier boy need to get back here now. This is...this is huge, LuLu. Like, change the world huge."

"Did you sleep at all last night, Rod?" I asked into the phone, recognizing the familiar excitement in his tone that only came from a night of no sleep.

"Did you?" It was a different voice that came through the speaker, deeper, but with a playful edge to it.

"Bucky..." Steve said slowly, in warning. I heard Bucky chuckle.

"Just get your asses over here, this is-" Roddy continued.

"Huge, I know." I finished for him. "Be there in a jiff."

Roddy attacked as soon as we got back to the apartment. His long hair was pulled back from his face but strands were falling out, his eyes were bloodshot and I could see the deep creases on the top of nose where his glasses rested.

"Why did Hitler want Egypt?" He asked, pushing me by my shoulders over to the kitchen island that was filled with scrolls and notes.

"This sounds like the opening to a really bad joke." I broke away from him and tried to make out his work.

"Just answer, smartass."

"He wanted the Suez Canal. Then he could connect the Afrika Corps with the Army Group South and take over the Caucasus Oil fields." I stated the facts from rote memorization, it was a very basic question of Nazi strategy.

"That's what I told him." Bucky interjected. He was back in a casual jeans and t-shirt ensemble and was sipping a cup of dark coffee.

"Yes," Roddy looked over at Bucky and I saw something pass between them, a conspiratorial look like an unknown shared joke. "That's what history books say, but why did Hitler _want_ Egypt?"

I raised my eyebrows and shrugged. "You got me."

"He was crazy, and obsessed with the occult, right?" Roddy prompted. "And you wrote in your dissertation that the Red Skull was convincing him that science and magic were one in the same, right?"

"You read my dissertation?"

Roddy rolled his eyes. "Of course I did, your grammar was terrible by the way."

"I never got past the first draft." I protested.

"The point, Roddy?" Steve entered the conversation and tried to get us back on track.

"The point is these scrolls are spells, Egyptian black magic." Roddy was practically bouncing on the balls of his feet.

"Tell them the best part." Bucky was smirking over at him. "The chemicals."

" _Alchemical_." Roddy corrected.

"Alchemical?" I pulled one of the pages of notes off of the table. "Are you saying these geometrics are alchemical?"

"Most of them, some are Wakandan, I had to send those off to a translator. But Lu, alchemy! Nazis! Egyptian magic! I'm like Indiana Jones!" Roddy was smiling wide and looking at me.

"That's a movie character." Bucky turned to a confused looking Steve. "He made me watch it last night while he worked."

"But what does it actually _say_?" I tried to pull the conversation back on course.

"It's a map, or part of a map."

"A map to where?" Steve asked.

"Not to where, Cap. To _what._ And the what is obvious. It's alchemy, something Hitler risked half his army for. It's the Philosopher's Stone, it has to be." Roddy's face was lit up in excitement.

"Rod, that's just a myth. Maybe, maybe you need to get some rest." I told him gently.

"What's the Philosopher's Stone?" Steve asked, more confused than ever.

"The main goal of medieval alchemy," I started to explain. "Was to discover the right combination of ingredients for the Philosopher's Stone. Supposedly it could change base metals into gold and contained the elixir of life; a potion for immortality. But it's just a story, just a bunch of crazy medieval voodoo disguised as science."

"It's more than that Lucy. The earliest mentions of it date all the way back to the Romans! Plus," Roddy pulled our dad's journal from the pile. "Dad wrote about it too. He said Hydra was after a weapon, something older than Nazi Germany that would change the course of the war and all wars."

"The tesseract." Steve stated. "But I stopped that in 1945."

"Not just the tesseract, the stone too. You have to believe me, the evidence is all right here!" Roddy gestured to the table. "This is the big secret! And now because of those guys last night, Hydra knows that we know where it is."

"Which is where, exactly?" Steve looked dubiously at Roddy.

"Nefertiti's tomb, didn't I say that?" Roddy looked over to Bucky with a confused look.

"No." Bucky deadpanned back.

"Nefertiti doesn't have a tomb." I though back to my few ancient history and art history courses. "At least not one that anybody's ever found, the ancients weren't too keen on a woman pharaoh."

"And if you bothered to read any of MY publications you would know that there is a team of archaeologists who believe her tomb is in a hidden chamber of Tutankhamen's tomb."

"King Tut!" Steve exclaimed, "I remember that, people were crazy about all this Egypt stuff back in the day."

I swear Roddy flinched at the term 'all this Egypt stuff' but he nodded at Steve anyway. "So we need to get to Luxor and quick, there's no telling how much of this Hydra actually knows."

"For that matter," Bucky joined us at the island. "There's no telling how secure we are here, Hydra could strike any minute."

"I can call in some favors, it might take a day or two to arrange everything though." I could practically see the wheels turning in Steve's brain, figuring out the logistics of what we were planning. "Can you get us to this tomb once we're there?" He asked Roddy.

"The lead archaeologist is an acquaintance of mine, he should be fine with it."

"Alright, everyone sit tight here until we're ready to go, the few people moving in and out of the building the better."

* * *

Steve's favor took nearly a full two days to call in. During that time he wasn't around the apartment much at all and Roddy spent most of his time on the phone with his Egypt contact or pouring over his notes and the scrolls.

"Your brother is intense." Bucky said suddenly while we were watching Breakfast at Tiffany's in the living room. I looked over to where Roddy sat at the kitchen island furiously translating something, his glasses falling off the end of his nose as usual.

"When he gets going on something, he can be."

I expected Bucky to say something else but he turned his attention back to Holly Golightly. The two of them were amicable with each other, even joking around at times. However, I could see my brother's slightly lingering glances and knew that his attraction had developed into a full blown crush. For Roddy's sake, I hoped Bucky didn't notice, I didn't want to see my brother hurt.

The door to the apartment opened and I yelled hi to Steve without turning around, we were just getting to the good part where Audrey sang 'Moon River' from her balcony.

"This is one of Pepper's favorites too."

I spun around at the familiar but unfamiliar voice and stared in shock at Tony Stark.

"Hi, I'm Tony." I stood up and took his offered hand, still in a little bit of shock. Of course I knew that Steve was friends with him, they were on the Avengers together, but seeing one of the most famous men in the world in my living room was still disconcerting.

"Tony this is Lucy, Bucky, and Roddy." Steve introduced each of us in turn and put his arm around me.

"Ah Lucy, I've been wanting to meet the teacher who stole our Captain from us."

I blushed slightly when Steve kissed my cheek after Tony's comment. "Well I'm not a teacher anymore." I felt a slight pang of nostalgia when I remembered how much I loved my old career.

Tony had already moved on. "And of course the Winter Soldier, your reputation proceeds you."

Bucky shot him a death glare. "My name is Bucky." He said resolutely.

"Sure." Tony said. "Anymore of your old army buddies going to pop out of the snow?"

"Tony is loaning us transportation and gear to get to Egypt." Steve cut through the conversation, clearly an expert at knowing when to get Stark to stop talking.

"Yes, I'm financing your treasure hunting trip, so I just wanted to come up here and meet the intrepid crew."

My eyebrows crinkled in confusion. "Why isn't SHIELD just letting us use their stuff?"

"Didn't Captain Handsome tell you?" Tony looked over to Steve. "When Romanoff leaked all their files SHIELD had to go so far underground they couldn't do anything. So I bought them out, for all intents and purposes I own SHIELD and the Avengers Initiative."

"Isn't that an awful lot of power for one person to hold?" I put my hands on my hips and stared him down, that didn't feel right to me.

"It keeps the government out things." Steve explained. "SHIELD and the Avengers are the only line of defense against global threats, that shouldn't be controlled by corrupt politicians just trying to get re-elected."

I saw Tony grind his teeth together, Steve had apparently struck some kind of nerve. "Yes, well, keep us updated Rogers. When you get back, bring Lucy to the tower so Pepper can meet a fellow Audrey fan."

"See you, Tony." Steve walked Tony out the door.

Roddy who had barely glanced up from his work through the whole visit finally lifted his head from the table. "Does that mean we get a jet?"


	16. Chapter 16

I have to admit, James Buchanan Barnes is my first love of the Captain America universe so I couldn't resist playing with him a little bit at the end of this chapter. His subplot has just sort of taken off, I'm even thinking of making a sequel to this fic featuring Bucky and Roddy. Anyway, thank you to my new followers, I hope you are enjoying the story! Leave me a review to let me know what you think!

* * *

Steve parked the car next to an older but well-kept home.

"What are we doing here?" I asked when he came around and opened the door for me.

"There's someone I want you to meet." He took my hand and lead me up the stairs and through the front door.

The front room of the house was cozy with a fire going in the fireplace, cushiony looking furniture, and photos decorating the floral wallpapered walls. A woman in nurse scrubs emerged from a back room.

"Hi Kathy, how's our girl doing today?" Steve asked the nurse.

"She's having a good day, Captain Rogers. Asked when you were going to get here." The woman smiled fondly back at the room and headed for the front door.

"Wait here a minute?" Steve kissed my hand and disappeared in the room. I took the chance to look closer at the pictures on the wall. Most of them showed the same family, kids growing up, graduation photos, wedding photos, family holidays. It was clear that whoever lived here had lived a long, full life. I came to one photo that had a special place on the mantel and knew who we were visiting. It was the same picture from the Smithsonian, Bucky, Steve, and Peggy Carter laughing together.

"Lucy, come here." Steve held out his hand to me and ushered me into a bedroom. Laying on the bed was a frail woman with white hair. Despite her obviously failing body, she had a twinkle in her eye that told me the infamous tenacity of Peggy Carter was still in there.

"Oh, I've been waiting to meet you." Peggy smiled wide and reached a hand out to me. "Peggy Carter, it's so nice to meet you Lucy."

"Ms. Carter, it's an honor to meet you." I took her hand and sat down in the chair next to her bed.

"Steve, give us some time for girl talk. Go put the kettle on." Peggy motioned for Steve to leave the room.

"Yes ma'am." He smiled at me and left.

"You two have it bad, don't you?" Peggy looked over at me.

I was suddenly embarrassed. This was, after all, Steve's old flame. "I - well - yes we do I suppose."

"I'm happy that he is finally living, I was worried he was going to live out the rest of his life pining for the old days." She started to cough a motioned for me to hand her the glass of water next to her bed. She drank nearly the whole glass.

"I'm sorry that he didn't get to grow old with you." I meant it, I could tell just from the brief interaction I had seen between them that there was a close bond there.

"Oh, don't you dare!" Peggy waved her hand at me dismissively. "I'll tell you something, the day he crashed," She closed her eyes, lost in the memory. "That was one of the worst, most horrific moments of my life. But, I moved forward. Fell in love, had a wonderful family, a career, everything I ever wanted. So don't you dare go feeling guilty about ancient history."

"Sorry," I looked down. "I just meant - well, sometimes I forget that he had this whole life decades before even my parents were born. I can't imagine going through the things he has."

"Well," Peggy began thoughtfully. "Let me give you some advice for dealing with him before this damned brain slips again."

Peggy pulled herself further up on her pillow and fixed me with a hard stare. "He's reckless, I'm sure you know that, but you have to pull him back from the edge when he gets there. He'll always sacrifice himself to save others. You have to remind him of his own worth. Also, make him take you dancing, don't trust pretty secretaries around him, and make him fondue one night." She smiled and I started to see the spark in her eye fade.

"I'm not much of a dancer." I said softly.

"You just need the right partner." Peggy closed her eyes and started to hum an old tune, one I wasn't familiar with. "I'm sorry, dear, I don't seem to remember your name?" When she opened her eyes I knew that the disease eating away at her brain was attacking.

"It's fine, Ms. Carter. My name is Lucy, I'm Steve's friend."

"Steve? No, is he here? He's been gone for so long..." She drifted off and I knew she was gone, lost to her mind. I discreetly stood up and walked out the door.

Steve was waiting in the front room with a tray of tea. "Steve?" I said softly, not wanting to further disturb Peggy.

"Did she start to forget?" He asked, standing up with the tray and heading for the door. "I'm going to go say goodbye, are you alright out here?"

I nodded and he kissed my head. He left the bedroom door open and I heard him walk in and pour the tea. "Steve? You're back?" I heard a frail voice say.

"Of course I am, Peggy. I couldn't leave my best girl." I heard Steve's voice crack a little and my heart cracked along with it. "Not when she owes me a dance."

After a few minutes Steve emerged from the room with red eyes. I went over and wrapped my arms around his waist, just holding him the best I could. "Thank you." I whispered and he kissed the top of my head.

"Let's go home." He took my hand again and walked me to the door. 'Home' for now was Sam's house. Bucky had started to get antsy about being in what he viewed as a vulnerable location and so Steve worked it out that we could finish our last little bit of planning at Sam's. Sam and Steve would pilot the jet to Egypt, we were leaving that night.

"Do you regret it?" I asked as Steve maneuvered through traffic. "Everything that happened back in '45?"

Steve pursed his lips together and furrowed his brows. "I don't think I regret it. If I didn't crash into the ice no one would have tried to save Bucky when the Winter Soldier showed up last year. I sometimes wish things had gone differently, for all of us, for Bucky and Peggy and the rest of us - Howard too. I think the hardest pill to swallow was learning that Howard Stark was a bad father. But I can't regret any of it, because if things didn't happen exactly as they did, I would have never found you."

We were mostly silent the rest of the ride to Sam's house, each of us lost in our own thoughts. We got the house and were surprised that only Roddy was inside.

"The other two went for a run. Well, Sam went for a run and a few minutes later Bucky said he was going too." Roddy shrugged and continued the book he was reading.

A few minutes later a sweat drenched Sam walked into the living room and nearly collapsed on a chair. Bucky swaggered in shortly after and lightly punched Sam on his right shoulder. "On your right." He said.

"I hate you." Sam chugged a bottle of water and glared at Bucky.

"You're next." Bucky turned his attention to me.

"Oh no, I don't run unless something is chasing me." I put up my hands defensively.

"Not running -" Bucky started then looked over Steve and silently asked him a question.

"Bucky and I were talking," Steve started slowly. "I want him to teach you how to fight, at least how to defend yourself."

"Why can't you do it?" Roddy joined us in the living room and asked Steve.

"I...have experience teaching people how to fight." Bucky lifted his face in a cocky half smile. "Plus Stevie would get distracted the moment he had to put Lucy in a hold."

"Buck..." Steve said in a low growl of warning.

"Ok, Lucy." Bucky ignored his friend. "I'm going to grab you from behind like Rumlow did and you're going to escape. Not the same way you did from him, please." He added after a beat.

"Wait, what? We're doing this now?" I heard my voice rise an octave in concern. Before I had a chance to react Bucky was on me, lightly putting his hand on my neck and holding his metal hand on my head.

Roddy laughed and headed back in the direction of the kitchen. Sam hollered for me to step on Bucky's foot. "Try to get out." Bucky growled into my ear. I tried stepping forward but the pressure on my throat increased. "That's a good way to strangle yourself." I then tried pulling his arm off of me with my free hands but his arm wouldn't budge. "You're too tiny to get away using brute strength." Bucky readjusted his grip on my throat, being very careful not to actually hurt me. "Step on my right foot with your heel as hard as you can, then twist so my hand is forced to the back of your neck, then head butt me."

"I don't want to hurt you!" I tried to picture the maneuver in my mind.

Bucky barked out a laugh. "Trust me, that's impossible."

I did as I was told and wound up breaking free of his hold victoriously. "Good job." Bucky told me. "But it will happen a lot faster in real life. You're tiny, so anyone who attacks you is going to think you're weak, if you work hard enough you can use that to your advantage. Trick your enemies into a false sense of security then attack."

"Maybe just focus on teaching her how to defend herself first, Buck." Steve was watching us closely with an odd expression on his face.

"Jealous much, Stevie?" Bucky taunted.

"You're a jerk." Steve shot back.

"You're a punk." Bucky playfully punched towards Steve who evaded the hit with ease.

We spent the rest of the afternoon going over how to get out of various holds and what to do if someone suddenly grabbed me. I had taken boxing and self-defense classes before, but having Bucky as a teacher was a completely different animal. After a couple of hours I was sweating and my muscles were starting to ache. Annoyingly, Bucky wasn't even out of breath.

"We'll make a fighter of you yet." Steve handed me a bottle of water once we were done. I had managed to learn how to escape most of the holds Bucky threw at me, but was still very slow compared to him. "Let's get you cleaned up, we're heading out soon."

"Steak and eggs, coming up in 15!" Roddy yelled from the kitchen.

"Man you got into my steaks?" Sam started for the kitchen muttering about 'Wilson's home for wayward superheroes' and Steve used the distraction to pull me upstairs to the bathroom where he turned on the shower and started to strip my clothes off of me.

Steam started to fill the bathroom and Steve kissed me. "Can I confess something?" He asked.

"Well I'm no priest, but I suppose." I joked with him.

"I hated seeing Bucky's hands all over you, it took every ounce of self-control in me not to attack him."

I laughed. "Two 'Hail Marys" for penitence."

Steve smiled slyly at me and took off his shirt. "How 'bout instead I make you come so hard around my cock you see god."

Oh lord. Steve was perfect. Shirtless, steam covered Steve was delicious. But shirtless, steam covered, and dirty talking Steve was almost enough to make me come without even touching me.

We missed supper, by the time we emerged from the shower the guys had finished and were all putting the final touches on packing for Egypt. "You don't need to take that many books." Bucky was saying to Roddy.

"You don't need to take that many guns." He responded.

* * *

There were times when Bucky's mind was such a jumbled mess of memories and flashbacks he couldn't focus on what was going on around him. At times like that, he found it best to focus on something he was sure of. _Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes 32557038. Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes 32557038. Sergeant -_

"You doing alright?" The voice of the archaeologist cut off his thoughts. He looked across the aisle of the quinjet where Roddy McAuliffe was sitting with a book in his hand. His long sandy blonde hair was loosely following over the shoulders of his dark t-shirt. _Not a threat._ Bucky reminded himself. A friend, not a threat.

"I'm fine." Barnes responded. "Just not a fan of small spaces."

"Well I for one am never going back to flying coach after this." Lucy, Steve's girlfriend started to lay down on the bench next to her brother and put her head in his lap. She was a tiny waif of a thing, Barnes thought. Someone fragile, and useless in a fight, but someone that made Steve act like Steve again and therefore someone to be protected at all costs.

"Don't you have a soldier you could be laying on." Roddy looked down crossly at his little sister.

"He's busy flying the jet, deal with it." She stuck her tongue out at him and pulled a blanket over herself. After a while her even breathing told Bucky that she was asleep and he saw Roddy glance over the top of his book and slightly smile at her.

He caught Bucky's eye watching them. "Don't tell her I told you, but I don't mind her sleeping on me. Reminds me of when we were little, whenever she had a nightmare or if it stormed really bad she would come to mine and my twin brother's room, we kind of liked feeling like we were protecting her."

Bucky watched the blonde haired siblings for a moment as a small sliver of memory came to him. "I had a sister." He said slowly. "Her name was Rebecca."

Roddy sat his book down. "Do you know what happened to her?"

Bucky shook his head. "I don't remember."

The doctor looked at him for a few moments. Surprisingly, it didn't make Bucky uncomfortable, not like when Sam or Natasha would gape at him after he said something wrong. It wasn't a look of pity or confusion Roddy gave him, just a look of wanting to know more.

"It'll come back to you, like you told me the memories do. Or -" Roddy scratched at the slight scruff around his chin. "We could look her up when we get back stateside."

Bucky nodded back at him, indicating he would like that. He wasn't sure what to make of the doctor. The man was different from everyone else he had met since breaking free from his Hydra handlers and finding Steve. He had the build and muscles of a fighter, but was not a soldier. He had the cunning for espionage, but was not a spy. He was always trying to solve things, solve the puzzle of the scrolls and his father's journal. Roddy was so enveloped in his work the other night that he never noticed Bucky watching him from the living room, studying the way he moved, making mental notes of the way he would pull of his glasses and rub his eyes when he came to an unsolvable problem.

There was more, too. When they would sit next to each other or accidentally touch, Bucky felt...something. Something that didn't make sense. A kind of electricity maybe? He wanted to ask Steve if that was normal. It had been so long since he had any kind of human touch, other than pain, that he didn't remember what all was normal. Bucky did know that he was currently strangely jealous of Lucy, than he wanted to be laying down where she was because something about Roddy made him feel...peace.


	17. Chapter 17

Confession time: I have writing ADD. There hasn't been an update for a while because my brain skipped over to my Bucky-centric story, Raze. So I had to force myself to buckle down and write this chapter, I really hope you enjoy it! Leave me a review!

* * *

I woke up the sound of an explosion and started to panic before I felt Roddy put his arm on my shoulder.

"Fireworks, Happy New Year!" He pointed to the window of the jet where Bucky was also staring wide-eyed and flinching just slightly at every explosion. I looked out the window to one of the most beautiful sights I've ever seen. Fireworks going off over the Pyramids at Giza. A million colors filled the sky over the famous tombs.

"This has always been my favorite place to fly into." Roddy was grinning ear to ear down at the scene. Coming back to Egypt was sort of a homecoming for him; he had lived here for four years while writing his dissertation that he later turned into a book. His former advisor was currently working in Giza and had procured transportation for us from Giza to the Luxor, all of this had to be done under the cover of Roddy doing more research.

We landed on a small airstrip outside of the city and were greeted by a small SHIELD team. "Captain America, it's an honor!" The leader of the group saluted Steve and motioned us towards a humvee with all of our stuff. We were taken to a small flat in an abandoned building in the actual city. With the promise of backup if we needed it the SHIELD team dispersed and the five of us were left alone.

"I'm going to meet up with Maxim and find out what the plan is for getting inside the tomb." Roddy sent a text message and lifted his backpack further up on his shoulder.

"Sam, go with him. No one travels alone here, we don't know if Hydra is tailing us." Steve commanded in his best business voice. The two of them took off and I walked to the only window in the apartment to look at the view.

"Lucy," Bucky's deep voice invaded my thoughts. "An amateur sniper could take you out from there." I looked back where he and Steve were pouring over maps of the area. They both were in civilian clothes, cargo pants and t-shirts. Even though they were meant to look like tourists, the military oozed off each them. It was in the way they carried themselves - backs too straight and the way they were each constantly looking around, analyzing the area around them.

"I'll let you know if I see one." I turned back to the window. In all the years Roddy had lived here the only one us that was able to visit had been Sean. I was itching to get out and explore the new place.

My arms were suddenly jerked back behind me, not painfully, but forcefully. I looked back and saw that Bucky had snuck up on me. "What the hell, Buck?"

"Get out of the hold." He said calmly, while pulling us back away from the window. I looked over to Steve who simply cocked an eyebrow at us and gave Bucky a look.

"You know this one, Luce." He told me. I tried to clear my mind from the initial shock of having a deadly assassin attack me. I did know this one. I bent my elbows and made to jam the top of my head into Bucky's chin but he switched positions on me and held me by the waist. I looked up and saw that he had a mischievous grin on his face. This was one he hadn't taught me and I wasn't sure what to do. I tried to struggle away but he grabbed right hand and twisted it around to my left hip bone, then he pushed the right side of my waist away from his body and spun me right into Steve's arms.

Steve started laughing and pulled me into a tight hug. "Smooth, Barnes." He said over the top of my head.

"She's not at the window anymore." Bucky smirked at us and returned to the map. He leaned over the makeshift table that was really a door propped on two barrels and his hair fell over his face. He brushed it to the side and it fell back in his face, causing him to let out a frustrated sigh. He silently walked to the kitchen and came back with a pair of scissors and handed them to me. "Do you know how to use these?" He asked.

"Are you asking me to give you a haircut?" I was leaning against the wall with Steve next to me.

"Yes, can you?"

"I've cut Roddy's hair before, when Sean made fun of him for keeping it so long all the time. Here," I pulled a chair out and motioned for him to sit down. "How short do you like it?"

I saw Bucky furrow his brows. "I don't know."

"In the old days you always kept it short like mine." Steve told him. "You also used to carry pomade with you so you could fix it when a single hair fell out of place."

I put my hands in Bucky's hair and started to massage his scalp like a hairstylist would. Bucky sighed and leaned into my touch, the poor man was starved for human contact. "I'll just start with a little bit at a time and you tell me when to stop. Besides, I don't have a razor to do anything too short."

After a half hour of cutting Bucky's hair was still long, but groomed enough he could it back in a bun and out of his face if he wanted to. I showed him how to tie it back easily, amazed that it was a skill he didn't have.

"Sam and your brother should be back by now." Steve worriedly glanced out the window as if he expected to see them walking towards the building.

"When Roddy said he was going to meet with Maxim he probably meant drink with Maxim. That man always has choice vodka." I explained while sweeping up the mess that Bucky's haircut had caused.

"He's Russian?" Bucky asked sharply.

"Ukrainian, I think, or maybe Sokovian. One of the Eastern Bloc countries anyway. He was Roddy's mentor, I've only met him a handful of times when he's come to Chicago."

"Can we trust him?" Steve rested his thumbs on his belt buckle, looking concerned.

I thought for a moment. "I think Roddy trusts him, they've been through a lot together. If my older brother trusts him, I do too." I looked towards the window and noticed that Bucky had managed to perch himself on the sill holding one of his rifles. "You know Bucky, an amateur sniper could take you out from there." I teased.

Bucky looked back at me and smiled, "I'll let you know if I see any." He turned back to the window. I was rapidly becoming attached to the assassin. After only a few days his teasing nature and protectiveness made him feel like another brother to me. I could see why Roddy was so attracted to him, he was a good man trying to move forward after the worst of the worst happened to him. Not unlike my own super-soldier.

I shifted my attention back to Steve who was moving around the apartment, maybe triple checking for bugs or other hidden things. I was starting to get tired, the little bit of sleep I got on the quinjet was not nearly long or deep enough for me. There was a small room off of the main room of the apartment but no bed or mattress. We had dumped our bags in it, not planning on staying long. I laid down on the floor and rested my head on Steve's shield of all things, the arch of it perfectly supporting my head so I was just slightly tilted up.

"You make that thing look better than I ever could." Steve walked in after me and sat down, resting his back against the wall.

"I want to throw it sometime." I looked over at Steve. "Like you do."

Steve laughed at the mental image my suggestion no doubt brought to his mind. "We'll see about that." He scooted down so he was on the floor with me with his face next to mine. "Thank you for what you did for Bucky. I don't think anyone's treated him that kindly in seventy years."

"You have." I reminded him.

Steve shook his head. "I'm trying, I really am. He was in a marketplace in Bucharest when I first found him, buying plums. Sam and I followed him back to his apartment and he fought us. For weeks he would immediately attack if I so much as brushed against him. Banner was able to help some, a lot, really, but I wasn't sure how he would react to coming to DC and meeting you." Steve rolled on his back and sighed, taking my hand in his and kissing my knuckles. "You're some kind of magic though, I should have figured."

"I love how much you care about him." I rolled over as well so my chin rested on his chest.

"He's my brother." Steve stated simply, knowing I would understand the bond between siblings.

I lifted myself up so I was straddling him and leaned over to kiss him. Steve started to run his arms down my sides and pulled at the hem of my tank top. I stopped him from going further, "Bucky's right outside, we can't do that now."

Steve growled in frustration. "Well now I hate him."

I laughed and laid my head back down on his chest, still on top of him. "I'm tired anyway, and tomorrow's a big day. Just hold me for a while?"

Steve wrapped his arms around me and kissed my forehead. "Doll, I'll hold you as long as you need me to."

"I'm always going to need you." I whispered into his chest and drifted off to sleep.

I woke up hours later to Sam's voice yelling at us to get up. Steve was awake and running his hand through my hair.

"I guess break time is over." I reached up and captured his lips in a kiss earning a small moan from him.

"When this is over I'm taking you to a cabin in the middle of nowhere and am going to spend a whole week inside of you." He reluctantly slid me off and stood up while adjusting his clothes back to perfection.

"Is that a promise?" I also stood and wrapped my arms around his waist.

He lightly spanked me, "You bet your ass it is."

I laughed at his antics. "I wonder what your team would say if they knew you had such a dirty mouth, and mind for that matter."

Steve leaned over and picked up his shield and bag then turned back to me with one of his famous 'Captain America' smiles. "They won't know, that side of me is only for you, darling."

* * *

Roddy was wearing dark sunglasses and chugging coffee outside the apartment when we came down with our few bags.

"Rough night?" Bucky slapped him on the back and smiled.

"Great night," Roddy replied. "Rough morning."

"It was rough." Sam emerged from the apartment last, also in sunglasses and with a mug. "I never want to see a bottle of vodka again."

"Vodka?" Bucky looked over at Sam with a look of disbelief. "That's all it was?"

"Keep laughing, metalhead. Soon as I'm sober -"

"Alright that's enough." Steve interrupted their little catfight. "Roddy, is this your friend pulling up?" He nodded in the direction of a large vehicle headed our way.

I had never seen anything like it, part SUV, part tank. It came to a stop and an older man stepped out of the driver's side.

"Sam Wilson! My new friend!" Maxim greeted Sam with a big hug and a kiss on each cheek. Poor Sam looked miserable. "And of course," Maxim turned his attention to me. "Roger's beautiful little sister." He greeted me the same way he had Sam. Maxim was exactly what one would picture if you though of an eccentric old professor. His shock of white hair was a mess sticking out all over his head, despite the desert heat he wore dress slacks and button-up shirt with a khaki vest.

"Roger!" Maxim called for my brother who stood facing him immediately. "As promised," He patted the vehicle. "The best transport I could find."

"Thank you, Maxim." Roddy shook his hand and took the keys from him. "How much do I owe?"

Maxim waived his hand in the air. "To see you back in the field is payment enough. You are too good to be stuffed up in an office somewhere, even if you are chasing a myth."

"Doctor Koz -" Roddy started to say but was cut off by Maxim.

"You are trying to find a woman who doesn't want to be found. Doesn't matter if she's twenty-five or twenty-five-hundred, that is an impossible thing to do."

"Yes, well I remember an grouchy old archaeologist who once told me the only way to succeed in this line of work is to be eighty percent stupid and twenty percent reckless." Roddy smiled slyly at Maxim.

"And look at what happened to that grouch. A washed up old man pandering to tourists." Maxim shook his head sadly. "You be careful out there, boy. Don't raise any more demons than you are able to put down."

* * *

The trip to Luxor was bumpy, hot, and three hours long. Along the way Roddy filled us in on the plan. Maxim had arranged with the main archaeological team at King Tut's tomb for Roddy to take a small group (us) through the chambers closed off to tourists. As far as Maxim knew, Steve, Bucky, and Sam were graduate students working with Roddy on trying to find Nefertiti's tomb.

By the time we arrived, the Valley of the Kings was swarming with tourists and peddlers. We were escorted by a young archaeologist through the tomb until we came to a point where there were no more tourists milling about.

Roddy pulled a toolkit from his backpack and took an ice pick from it. "Maxim and I found this once before, there's a trick brick somewhere along this wall that leads to a hidden chamber. The chamber was caved in, though."

"Why would it be any different now?" Sam was feeling along the wall for the trick.

"It's not." Roddy said thoughtfully. "But now I have two enhanced super soldiers on my dig crew." He started lightly tapping on the bricks around him.

"Found it." Steve, who had been standing in the center of the narrow room announced.

"You haven't even been looking." Sam retorted.

Steve pointed to his left. "That brick has a symbol on it none of the others do."

I followed his finger and saw what he was talking about; a single brick with an engraving showing a circle with arrows coming out of it.

"The sign of Aten, right?" I asked Roddy. "The disc of the sun?"

Roddy nodded and approached the brick. "Not bad, Rogers." He pushed on the brick with his pick and it gave way. With a loud scraping sound the whole wall started to move ever so slowly until there was an opening wide enough for a person to fit through.

"What kind of Indiana Jones shit is this?" Sam looked at the wall in shock.

Roddy laughed at his expression. "The ancients were master engineers and architects, this is nothing."

One by one we squeezed through the space. It was much darker on the other side so Roddy handed each of us a long, narrow light.

"These don't give off much light." Bucky commented while shining his light along the wall.

"It's a special kind of light ray that won't damage the integrity of the artifacts we might find." Roddy explained and lead us all forward down the dark, narrow, hallway.

Steve kept his hand on my lower back the whole time we walked, occasionally needing to catch me when I stumbled over a rock. "How far underground are we?" He asked.

"More than sixty feet." Roddy replied.

"And how do we know the ceiling won't cave in?" Bucky asked, sounding just slightly nervous.

Roddy laughed. "It's lasted for thousands of years."

"But you said part of it is caved in." Bucky reminded him.

"That was probably the work of grave robbers." Roddy explained. We continued walking for what seemed like forever. The air around us was growing stagnant and my eyes were beginning to adjust to the darkness. Finally, we came to a dead end. Rubble was piled all the way to the ceiling.

Roddy started to pass around shovels. "Now comes the fun part."


	18. Chapter 18

Thank you all for the reviews and favorites/follows! It means so much to me to have readers going through this story with me! Keep it up, let me know what you think of the story! xoxo

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Without Bucky and Steve removing the rubble would have been impossible. As it was, it still took over an hour to clear the cave in. Roddy was the first to step in to the new corridor. He reverently put his hands on the walls and I could see with my flashlight that he had one of the widest smiles I'd ever seen on.

"We're the first people in possibly thousands of years to see this place." His words came out almost like a prayer.

"What exactly are we seeing?" Steve asked.

Roddy was preoccupied with amazement so I answered with what little knowledge I had of his research. "It's an antechamber, maybe even the one where Nefertiti's mummy was buried."

"And for those of us who don't know ancient Egyptian history, remind me why that's important." Sam was guiding his flashlight along the wall, revealing pictographs.

"Nefertiti was the wife of Amenhotep the Fourth, later known as Ahenaten." Roddy pulled himself out of his revery and motioned for us to follow him along the wall. "They were responsible for a religious revolution; shifting worship from the old pantheon to the god, Aten, the disc of the sun. They had six daughters, one of whom went on to marry Tutankhaten, later called Tutankhamen."

"So, she's King Tut's mother-in-law." Sam finished.

"Maybe," Roddy continued. "She could also be his sister, or his aunt, or even his mother."

"What the -?" Sam sounded disgusted but Roddy just laughed.

"Ya, Tut was incredibly deformed because of inbreeding. Anyway, we think Nefertiti even ruled as Pharaoh for a time. However she was related, she was important to Tut."

"You say no one's been here for thousands of years?" We heard Bucky's voice from behind us, no one had noticed that he wasn't right with us.

"Give or take, ya." Roddy circled around and walked towards Bucky who was shining his flashlight on the wall.

"Then explain this." He pointed at what he was looking at; a red image of a skull with tentacles coming out of it.

"Hydra." Steve frowned while looking at the image.

"That." Roddy's face was drawn in a deep scowl. "Doesn't make sense. The Nazis could not have possibly made it this far."

I ran my hand over the red image and then held my palm out to Roddy. "Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like this paint is Egyptian. It's blended in seamlessly with the wall."

Roddy closed in on the image, so close his nose was almost touching the wall. "It's ancient."

"Wonder what this does." Sam suddenly leaned down and pushed on a loose brick, causing the image to sink into the floor and revealing another room beyond the wall. We all jumped as the room was suddenly lit with flaming torches.

"Maybe don't press buttons on the evil symbol?" Bucky elbowed Sam.

Steve was the first to walk into the new room. I had never seen nor read about anything like it. The room was filled with gold from floor to ceiling, the walls were even inlaid with gold leaf images. At the head of the room was a giant sarcophagus underneath the symbol of Aten. Flaming torches lined the walls, but what lit them remained a mystery. Roddy walked to the sarcophagus in a daze.

"Nefertiti," Roddy read the ancient symbols aloud. "Mistress of the Two Lands."

"So that's your missing queen?" Bucky joined him on the pedestal next to the ancient coffin.

Roddy smiled over to him. "Ya, that's her."

"And the stone?" Steve was looking at a table with neatly lined canopic jars. "Could it be in one of these things?" He held one up featuring the bust of the god, Set.

"No." I laughed a little and took the jar from him. "These are the internal organs of the queen. Her liver, intestines, lungs, stomach -"

"We get it." Sam cut me off and looked slightly sick.

"They were removed before mummification." Roddy started to explain, his inner professor coming out. "It was really neat how they got the brains. They didn't want to crack the skull so a red hot poker was shoved up the naval cavity, twirled around in the skull, and then they pulled the brains out through the nose."

"Man you are way too excited about that." Sam still looked sick and shook his head at Roddy's enthusiasm.

"Start looking around the room for anything weird." Roddy ignored Sam's comment and tried to get us back on course.

"Anything weird?" Bucky crossed his arms and arched an eyebrow at Roddy. "In the underground Egyptian tomb hiding behind the Nazi symbol?"

"Well." Roddy looked momentarily confused. "Ya."

I ignored their back and forth and started looking around the chamber for anything remotely alchemical. It was obvious that no grave robbers made it to this part of the tomb or else the massive amount of treasure wouldn't be there. There were piles of papyrus scrolls, a war chariot, weapons, amphoras full of wine - that I had to warn Sam were probably not drinkable - and piles upon piles of gold jewelry.

"I think I found something." Bucky announced from his corner of the room. "Not the stone, but how the torches were lit." He motioned to a lever just inside the opening. "When the wall opened it made this oil run down at the same time two pieces of flint were being struck together by the motion of the door, the oil hit the spark and spread to each of the torches."

"Just like an ancient Rube Goldberg." Sam looked impressed, but the reference clearly went over Steve and Bucky's heads.

"Here's something." Steve pulled a golden box from a pile. "It kind of looks like a gold version of the box we found at Arlington."

Roddy delicately took it from him and started to translate. "As above, so below." He looked at me pointedly.

"Does that mean something?" Steve asked.

I explained, "It's a common phrase in alchemy. Symmetry and balance are two of the key beliefs of alchemists, they thought - not unlike the Egyptians - that the afterlife would be a perfect mirror to the world of the living."

"This is the power of the gods." Roddy continued to translate. "No mortal can bear witness to it and live."

"Well that sounds comforting." Steve put his arm around me and watched Roddy examine the box.

"Um, guys?" Sam called out to us. He was near the entrance and pointed up to the ceiling. I saw then that it was starting shake, just slightly. Bucky yelled that it was cave in and for us to get to the entrance.

Steve grabbed me and ran for the entrance, I saw that Sam made it out but lost track of Bucky and Roddy. I looked back in time to see Bucky dragging my brother out of the room as the whole ceiling started to crash down. Bucky covered Roddy with his own body and jumped out of the way of falling debris. They both landed in front of us just as the last bit of ceiling fell down. Roddy awkwardly disentangled himself from Bucky and mumbled a 'thank you.'

"I thought you said that wouldn't happen." Bucky angrily snapped.

"What I _said_ was that it hasn't happened." Roddy snapped back.

"We should get out of here before the rest of the place starts to go." Steve interrupted their argument. "Did you get the box?"

Roddy held up the small golden box and stuffed it in his backpack. We all followed him solemnly out of the antechamber and back up to the main tomb which was now tourist free.

"Did you find anything good, Dr. Mcaullife?" One of the archaeology interns yelled over once we emerged outside the tomb. Night had fallen and the desert was starting to get cold.

"Not a damn thing." Roddy yelled back. Of course he didn't want for anyone to know what we had actually found, at least not until he had more time to examine it for himself and maybe get back into the chamber. "Wait here, I'll find us somewhere to stay for the night." Roddy continued walking on while the rest of us waited by the vehicle.

Everyone looked beat; Sam sat in the driver's seat with the door open resting his head against the steering wheel, Bucky was sitting on the ground with his back on the rear tire, and Steve and I were on the ground next to him, I was between Steve's legs with my back to his chest and his arms wrapped around me. The interns and archaeologists at KV62 - the official name for King Tut's tomb - gradually took off until the site was empty.

"This reminds me of Afghanistan." Sam brought his head up and looked out across the desert. "The desert would get so quiet at night every little noise would make us jump, thinking it was an insurgent." Sam chuckled to himself. "One time Riley heard something rustling around in his tent, jumped up and hit it with shovel, only problem was 'it' happened to be our C.O. coming in to wake us up to help someone with stitches."

"It gets too quiet in the woods too." Steve squeezed his arms around me and kissed the back of my head. "We were in the Hürtgen Forest in '44 and one of the commandos, Dugan, was sure he heard artillery fire so he rushed out of his tent with his gun raised."

Bucky barked out a laugh, "That woodpecker he shot was delicious."

Sam, Steve, and Bucky all laughed at the story. It didn't matter that the two wars they were talking about took place decades apart, for a moment they were just three veterans swapping war stories. The camaraderie between them warmed my heart and I nestled in closer to Steve's chest and listened to them tell more stories while we waited for Roddy to return.

He finally came back just when I was starting to drift off to sleep. "There's a group of nomads just on the other side of the ridge who are willing to let us stay in one of their yurts."

"And how much did that cost?" I raised an eyebrow at him, knowing that the nomadic tribes of the region were not overly willing to help out foreigners.

Roddy shot me a smile. "I showed them a picture of you and they offered the tents plus two camels and a goat."

"You're joking, right?" Steve asked and Roddy laughed out loud.

"Of course! I'd never sell my sister to them, not when I know that with that blonde hair I could get triple what they offered down in Sudan."

"So four camels and two goats?" Bucky joined in on the joke. "Maybe even more yurts?"

"Oh, I think she's worth at least that, maybe even a cow." Roddy continued as we all piled into the vehicle once again.

I punched him hard in the shoulder. "Stop talking about selling me!" He just smirked at me and shot me a joking 'love you, Lulu.'

It probably won't happen, but if you ever get the chance to camp with a nomadic tribe in Northern Africa, you should. It turned out that Roddy knew camp leader's son through various work he had done in the area. Because Roddy was a friend we were treated to a meal around the fire and provided with three small, octagonal tents. The children were fascinated with Bucky's arm. At first, he was hesitant to show it off to them but after a few hours they were taking turns holding on to it while he lifted them off the ground by flexing. Even in the middle of the desert, the people had heard of Captain America and Roddy translated for Steve to tell them a story of the Avengers. The women were intrigued with my hair. Of course they had seen other blondes, tourists mainly, but this was apparently the first time they had one in their camp and giggled to each other as they tried to fashion it into a complicated braid similar to what they wore.

Steve and I were the first to leave the fire. I was eager to sleep and be alone with him. The tent itself was somewhat of a wonder. It was made of a series of intricately decorated silk sheets and held together with sticks. Steve pushed the two small straw mats together and made the bed up using the furry animal skins and woven blankets piled in one corner. We snuggled in under the blankets facing each other, Steve pulled me in close and kissed me deeply.

"Roddy told me that they will travel hundreds of miles a week sometimes." I whispered after we pulled apart.

"Sounds like when Bucky and I marched all over Europe." Steve smiled, even though it sounded awful to me the memory was clearly a good one for him.

"I'm kind of jealous of the nomads." I brushed a stray hair out of Steve's eyes. "I used to dream of just drifting around, not staying in one place for too long and traveling the world."

"You never wanted to just settle down somewhere?" Steve interlaced his hands with mine.

"That was never my dream, no. My mom used to say my head was always stuck up in the clouds, but I always just wanted to explore, to go places I'd never been."

"Is that still what you want?"

I looked up at Steve. His brows were drawn together, like I was a puzzle for him to work out. "So much has happened in the last few years..." I trailed off, thinking about Nate and DC and now this. "I don't know what I want anymore, sometimes I'm not even sure who I am anymore. But," I pulled Steve in for a kiss and stroked down his arm. "I know that wherever I end up, I want you with me. Doesn't matter if it's an apartment in DC or a yurt in the desert."

Steve closed his eyes and somehow found a way to bring me even closer to him. "What about an apartment in Brooklyn, with Bucky in the extra room, and traveling whenever you get the bug?"

"Steve," I pulled back and looked him in the eyes. "Are you asking me to move in with you?"

Steve nodded, "We found a decent place, Brooklyn's always going to be home for me and I want you there with me. It's close enough to the Avengers headquarters and SHIELD that I won't have to worry about getting to them in time when something happens. Stark is already fixing it up with a top of the line security system. It should be ready when we get back to the states."

"Are you really alright living together? I kind of thought that was too-" I cut myself off, not sure how to end the sentence.

"You thought I was too old fashioned to want that." Steve finished for me with a grin on his face. "When are people going to stop thinking I'm some kind of prude? Besides, I already told you I wasn't going to let you go, we're going to wind up married someday anyway."

I had been laughing but stopped when he said that. "Steve, that's...I...um..."

Steve's eyes went wide. "Oh, god, no Luce, I swear that wasn't me proposing." He flipped on his back and covered his eyes with his arm. "I'm really terrible at this."

I straddled him and forced his arm away from his eyes. "It's new territory for both of us, babe."

Steve visibly relaxed and brought his hands to my hips. "Will you do it, though? Move in with me, I mean."

"Of course, I'd love to." I bent forward and planted another kiss on him.

Steve started to move his hands under my shirt. "Bucky's not right outside anymore." He said slyly while continuing to run his hands over my ribcage.

"No, just an entire village of people."

"I can be quiet if you can." He suddenly sat up and brought his hands to my face, kissing me desperately. I moaned into his touch and found myself lightly grinding my hips against his. Steve hissed and pulled back, his hands entangled in my hair. "I want you, Lucy." He whispered and moved his hands to tug at my shirt.

We were soon both naked and panting, silently grasping after each other in the dark tent. Steve ran his hand down my body and pinched my clit. "I love how you get so wet for me." He whispered against my ear.

"Steve, I want you inside me. I _need_ you." I desperately whispered back. Steve positioned himself between my legs and slipped in slowly. I threw my head back at the sensation of being filled. We moved slowly, almost too slowly for me at times, exploring each other's body and giggling when one of us would suddenly moan a little too loud. Steve's lips never left my skin, he kissed my lip, my neck, my collarbone, bit down on my nipples and travelled back up to start over again.

"I' getting close, baby." Steve started to move faster inside me and brought his hand down to grip my hip roughly.

My own orgasm was quickly approaching as well and I tangled my hands in his hair and tugged hard. "Let go, Steve." I said, almost too loud. "I want to feel you come inside me."

Steve came with a shout of my name that surely woke up the whole village and I followed shortly after. He rolled off of me and cradled me against his chest.

"I love you so much." He whispered in my ear and we both drifted off to sleep.


	19. Chapter 19

Sorry it has been such a long time since I updated. My summer job left no time for writing, but now I have a few weeks off before the regular school year starts and I'm back to teaching. My goal is to finish the story before the school year. Please keep reviewing!

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Something woke me up. I couldn't tell what, but whatever it was caused Steve to wake as well. Within seconds he was on his feet, in clothes, and had his shield on his arm. A loud exploding noise shook the tent. I heard Sam yell for Steve and we both ran out of the tents. The whole village as well as our group were outside, most covering their ears for protection against the loud noises.

"Do you know what's happening?" I yelled over to Roddy who was still rubbing sleep from his eyes and had yet to put on a shirt. He shook his head just as another loud boom and what felt like an earthquake rattled the desert.

A blinding white light shot up from the direction of the tomb as another earthquake happened. The light seemed to be getting closer and the wind started picking up. Steve pulled me to himself and shielded us as the light and wind got closer and closer. If not for Steve holding me I would have been knocked over by the force of the wind once it reached its climax. Just as suddenly as it began, it ended and an eerie silence descended over the desert night. The nomads started rapidly speaking to one another and I saw Roddy run into his tent. He emerged moments later, now shirted, and with Dad's journal.

"That looked like a nuclear bomb test." Bucky joined us as we regrouped and tried to think of what that could have been. Steve wanted to rush right to the epicenter, but Sam reminded him that we would have known if it was an attack.

"The nomads are saying something about a curse." Roddy listened in on a conversation and interjected in their native language. One of the elders spoke harshly to Roddy. "They are saying that we brought a curse to them."

A loud scream shook through the whole encampment. It sounded like someone was being tortured, but was far too loud and too high pitched to be remotely human. The voice started yelling in a language I couldn't recognize. Around us, the villagers were quickly dismantling camp and starting to ride away. The yelling continued until we were left alone on the ridge. Steve took off with his shield to look over the edge and down to where the tomb was, all of the noise seemed to be coming from there.

"Guys, I think you should see this." We all joined him along the edge and looked down. I couldn't believe my own eyes and rubbed at them a few times. The tomb was just...gone. There was no evidence of the infamous burial site anywhere around, instead it was just more desert.

"That's impossible." Roddy's jaw was practically on the ground. "Where did it go?"

"Maybe that light took it out. Maybe it was nuclear." Bucky wondered out loud, staring down in disbelief as well.

"A nuclear blast would leave fallout. This is just," Sam furrowed his eyebrows. "It's just gone."

Roddy was furiously flipping through pages of Dad's notebook. Around us, the desert was eerily silent and still, like it was holding its breath to see what would happen next. Steve starting issuing orders, telling Bucky and Sam to regroup and get to the vehicle. He though we needed to get back to Cairo and the waiting S.H.I.E.L.D team tonight.

The scents of caramel, vanilla, spice, and sandalwood filled my nostrils. For a moment, the world around me went blindingly white then I was sitting in a squishy leather chair at the Cafe Lincoln. The espresso machine let out a loud hissing cry and the barista nearly dropped a ceramic mug.

"Miguel?" I looked confusedly over at the barista.

"Sorry miss, I'll have that order in a second." Miguel busied himself making my coffee.

The bell over the door chimed and Steve walked in. Miguel immediately made his regular choice - black coffee with three sugars. "Here you go Captain."

"Steve!" I rushed to him. "What happened back there? What are we doing here?" I put my hands on his chest, hoping for some clarity and comfort.

Steve gingerly removed my hands from his body. "Sorry ma'am, do I know you? Do you need help?"

"What?" I was shocked. A part of me realized something happened in Egypt that caused us to go back in time or something, but it wasn't fully registering. Why would I be the only one to remember what happened? "It's me, it's Lucy. Please tell me you remember something! Egypt, Sam, Bucky-"

"Bucky?" Steve's posture changed immediately. "What do you know about Bucky?"

I looked around at the shop. This was the first day we met, I could tell by the clothes Steve was wearing and the way Miguel looked at me like I was a stranger. I had somehow been sent all the way back here before Steve knew me, before we fell in love.

"Does anything about me seem familiar?" I looked up at Steve's eyes. The hurt of him not recognizing me stabbed at my heart.

"What do you know about Bucky Barnes? Who are you?" Steve crossed his arms over his chest and I knew he had fallen into 'Captain America' mode. He wouldn't be any help to me, besides, S.H.I.E.L.D was about to be attacked from the inside and he needed to focus on that. Years of watching science fiction movies and shows reminded me that messing with timelines was a recipe for disaster.

"Sorry, Captain. I'm mistaken, I haven't been sleeping all that much and must have been confused." I tried to slide past him out the door but he stopped me.

"Who are you?" He asked more insistently. It was a tone I had only heard him use with people he viewed as a threat.

"My name is Lucy, I'm just a teacher. Sorry, it really was a mistake. Guess I just need more coffee." I tried to smile and cover up my blunder with a joke. The bell rang again and a woman entered the coffee shop. She flashed Steve and I a sly smile, something about her was familiar, but I couldn't place exactly what.

"Lucy." My heart leaped at the sound of my name on Steve's lips. I glanced up and he had a far off look in his eye, similar to when he would talk about his life before being frozen. "Something is...wrong." Steve started to look around the coffee shop, taking in details I would probably never notice before finally landing on me.

My phone rang and Roddy's name flashed across the screen. He hadn't called me on the original day Steve and I met, maybe he was in the same situation I was. "Roddy, where are you?" I answered quickly and heard heavy breathing on the other end, as if someone had just finished running.

"Thank god." Roddy panted out before sucking in a deep breath. "Do you remember going to Egypt with Captain America?"

Steve clearly heard the conversation and glared down at me. "Yes, I remember everything. I thought I was the only one. Are you in Chicago?"

"No." Roddy's voice lowered. "I'm in Bucharest, and Bucky is trying to kill me."


End file.
